Save me the bullshit. Is Gnosticism worth reading about or is it just early shaman gobbledygook?

>>24480010 (OP)
Gnosticism is a failure to understand the fall and freewill.

It's just a satanic inversion of truth and followers of gnosticism, or at least the more notable ones in today's society, have a worse end than their beginning (pic related as one example, showing another satanic inversion of truth).

Read schizojak
>>24480032

>>24480010 (OP)
alexandrian jew syncretism. retroactively refuted by plotinus (pbuh)

>>24480032
Transgenderism is an obsession with the body and not the transcendence of the body and its desired urged in what could be called the Gnostic pragmatic metaphysics - pragmatic in being practical, meant to be directly experienced, metaphysics in the sense of “going beyond the physical”, as it already commonly means.

Transgenderism is again an obsession with the body because they are mutilating it, surgically, hormonally and chemically altering it, then dressing it up in specific outfits meant to make them seem like the gender they want to be. That is body-obsession, not transcendence of the body.

>>24480093
Mandaeism, Manichaeism.

>>24480010 (OP)
It's worth studying.

>>24480032
There's no such thing as a Gnosticism to transgenderism pipeline. It's the archons who represent the dissolution of boundaries, and they were hated and feared for that reason.

>>24480032
Gnosticism is a radicalization of the fall. Reality is malignant and the cosmos itself is fallen, not just man himself.

>>24480010 (OP)
“Gnosticism” is a term which, from what I have seen, is invariably interpreted in very divergent ways by each person who invokes it. As such I cannot endorse “gnosticism” as a whole as worth reading about because you could be thinking about something beyond my own definition, but I can assure you that there are some very interesting ideas contained within certain primary documents of a so-called gnostic character from antiquity, which must be assessed each on their own merits rather than as constituent parts in a wider gnostic system. I would point to at the more well-known treatises of the nag hammadi library (eg gospel of thomas, gospel of phillip) and the corpus hermeticum as good places to start.

Gnosticism is a symptom of the spiritual decay and confusion that runs rampant in the ruins of modernity. Such a blatantly satanic worldview would have never gained traction before the internet

>>24480151
This is what I mean, OP. Any discussion on the topic of “gnosticism” is bogged down by people talking about the gnostic ideology and it as a facet of modernity. What they are talking about I have little idea. How does it connect to those works which have come down to us in manuscripts from late antiquity is unclear to me. No one is drawing the connection for me. It is best to treat of them as different areas of inquiry and identify which the person commenting is talking about before you evaluate their comments on it.

>>24480161
Voegelin was a disaster for Gnostic studies.

>>24480102
>There's no such thing as a Gnosticism to transgenderism pipeline.
There clearly is.

The Bible even says false prophets defile the flesh like Sodom and Gomorrah. Gnostics are false prophets.

>>24480165
Thanks for pointing him out. No wonder there can never be discussion. Seemingly he took every component of gnosticism I don’t care about and poisoned the well for the interesting aspects. It’s a great shame. OP should just engage with the primary texts on their own merits and try to steer clear of this terminological riffraff.

>>24480167
You're conflating Gnosticism with tranny crypto-Cartesianism, which admits the dualism between soul and matter but refuses to let matter drop off and return to its principle. Gnostics are not interested in reforming their bodies, much less the material world. You remind me of those people who confuse dying to the world with the destructive effects of modernity, as if Gnostics and Buddhists are out there lobbying for the decimation for the Amazon. Voegelin and the German Romantics have been an absolute catastrophe for Gnostic and Buddhist scholarship.

>>24480010 (OP)
You either become schizophrenic or transgender

>>24480167
That doesn't make any sense. The Christians were the ones cutting their nuts off. They had to have a council ban the practice because it was so popular.

>>24480253
You're thinking of the proto-Catholic and gnostic Origen, right? Yeah, he's not Christian buddy. He had secret teachings which he didn't share with most of his students because he was a gnostic faggot.

>>24480206
Retard. All false prophets defile the flesh, that's why Catholic priests are a bunch of pedophile sodomites. Cope harder about you gay little retarded cult that doesn't even understand the first three chapters of the Bible. I'm not even reading your entire post, retard.

>>24480260
Imbecile.

>>24480010 (OP)
It's bullshit, not a real religion, the only people you find shilling it are obviously schizo/have severe personality flaws. For example, >>24480260. Who would be attracted to a dead religious movement that promises secret knowledge of God? Schizos, retards, and faggots.

>>24480279
It promises self-knowledge, which Gnosticism believes is functionally indistinguishable from knowledge of God. I remember when people on /lit/ used to read.

>>24480256
>The first canon of the First Council of Nicaea in 325 AD forbade clergy members to voluntarily castrate themselves "when in perfect health"

Christians LOVED cutting their dicks off and turning tranny.

>>24480293
There are dozens of different schools of gnosticism and they don't say the same thing. Your argument: "You said knowledge leads to God... but joke's on you buddy, because the self IS God!" I'm happy to let this stand as it is. Go on and take another shot, every post you make will dissuade any rational person from staying well away from "Gnosticism".

>>24480260
>I'm not even reading your entire post, retard.
No intelligent conversation is really possible then with you on this subject for now, which is fine by me, thanks for openly admitting it. I already suspected that was the case. Lots of people here make a caricature of Gnosticism, or highlight and exaggerate what seem like the worst parts of it, and turn it into “a tranny Luciferian cult” in their mind; and, like you, mostly are not open to any opposition to that judgment.

For those interested in an extraordinary modern take on Gnosticism, though, I would recommend Philip K. Dick’s loose VALIS trilogy. That’s VALIS itself, The Divine Invasion, and The Transmigration of Timothy Archer, all notable for being after his 2-3-74 mystical experiences that changed his life, and for investigating Christian and Gnostic mysticism, besides spiritual miscellanea he was also attracted to, from Buddhism and Taoism to Hermeticism, Platonism, and so on. A really groovy, mindfucking foray into a sort of perennial philosophy, but with strong roots in Christ.

It’s not especially “life-denying”, the Gnosticism of PKD’s post-1974 life and works, except inasmuch as it criticizes the parts of material sensate life that can be like traps for the soul, lures and snares that make one sunk in spiritual amnesia, or ultimately causing suffering to oneself and others. The core “Gnostic” insight here is awakening beyond this trap, and to direct experience of and knowledge of the transcendent God, inasmuch as the limited human psyche can receive it. Christ is the Messenger of this in PKD’s Gnosticism.
Where older Gnosticism has the demiurge Yaldabaoth and his malevolent archons ruling the Earth, causing suffering, and as if squeezing and feeding off of our souls or life-force (also like an analogy to farming of animals), PKD also investigates this, especially explicitly in VALIS, but also makes especial parallels of this to the modern political state of affairs, where a new form of technocratic totalitarianism and rule-by-secrecy and conspiracies seems to be rising, centered especially in the West. This he symbolizes as “the Black Iron Prison”, and also likens it to the Roman Empire, saying in fact that “The Empire never died.”

A core part of the Gnostic awakening is also a remembering of the spiritual knowledge that already lies deep in our spirit, which has, however, as if been put to sleep by the material world and societal conditioning. Also akin to Plato’s anamnesis (“removal of amnesia”), or remembering of all the knowledge, including of the higher Forms, already latent in our souls, which enjoyed concourse with this higher spiritual knowledge before its descent into the body. Groovy!

>>24480010 (OP)
>or is it just early shaman gobbledygook?
This is literally the only reason to read about Gnosticism, it is philosophical bunk but the little fragments of magical method preserved to our time are precious.

>>24480295
>this council of boylover faggot pagan idolaters are real Christianity

>>24480313
>>24480279
Nobody cares about gnostic tranny bullshit, retard. You're gonna troon out in 3 years.

>>24480300
What remains of the self when it has extinguished its attachment to the world can only be God, yes.

>>24480318
I’m sorry, I have to say, you’re an imbecile. First, you responded angrily to this post: >>24480279, but that poster is also an anti-Gnostic like you similarly flaming against Gnosticism.
Second, while responding to my post: >>24480313 you bring up a nonsensical picture that doesn’t apply to me, and talk about me “trooning out”, where I also made this post: >>24480096, giving a very simple, brief response about how equating all Gnosticism with the transgender-lunacy-cult is stupid, and show how some basic elements of Gnosticism could be used to argue against this transgender-lunacy-cult. They don’t match up in the way you think they do.

Please realize, you make snap judgments too quickly, and absurdly lump people into some caricature, stereotype, or imagined group they don’t always belong to. It’s awfully stupid. I also wonder whether you’re on /lit/ for a good reason at all, and whether you really belong here. Do you actually sincerely like and read much good literature in your free time? It seems /pol/ is more up to your speed, but you’re instead here to have /pol/ discussions, except with a bare pretense of some intellectualism, by sometimes bringing up some stuff you might know about some literature, philosophy, or culture (possibly a lot of it filtered through memes, discussions here, or Wikipedia pages). You’re not being intelligent at all, I’m sorry to say.

>>24480380
Your generosity and patience is wasted on people like him. They can't comprehend anything outside the culture war framework. They're impoverished. Cut your losses.

>>24480382
Thank you. And, sadly, that’s probably true enough. However, surprising as it may sound, I actually have some sympathy for the /pol/-kiddies. They, at minimum, seem to be at least a little more aware, awake and alive than the hardcore modern Reddit “liberals”, many of whom are not very “liberal” at all, but instead seem to be decidedly very illiberal. Weird as it may sound, I prefer people on here calling me trannies and kikes, to braindead Redditors being on here and calling me “Nazis”, “incels, “chuds”, or whatever, for such-and-such a view, over whatever inane, half-witted culture-war issue there might be nowadays.

The tinysouled semi-sentient minion drones who think everyone who disagrees with them is a “Nazi”, have those views inculcated in them and encouraged by much of the education system and mainstream media in parts of the West. The /pol/ kiddies also have their own extreme form of social conditioning, propaganda, and brainwashing, but at least it’s a form somewhat more offensive and genuinely risky and edgy in mainstream society. Even if it ends up that even they, too, are Mossad/CIA/MI6/FSB/CCP ops or whatever, or exploited and manipulated by the operations of such entities, at least those operations are targeting somewhat more edgy and freethinking people (even if it’s simply to corral them into a slightly different pen for psywar and controlled-opposition plans). That’s my little schizo rant.

>>24480380
Check it out everyone, someone who takes Philip K Dick as a spiritual authority is calling someone else an imbecile.

>>24480380
You're wasting your time replying to him, he's probably only posting on /lit/ because he got destroyed on /his/ yet again.

>>24480032
everything is satanic
christians are fucking pathetic lol.

>>24480032
I'm buddhist though

Gnosticism is interesting but unnecessary. At first it seems like a better answer to theodicy than "Nicene" Christianity, and appeals to intellectual types for various obvious reasons, but a proper understanding of the ontology of the Fall (especially within an Orthodox theological lens) should make you disregard the gnostic views. The Resurrection of Christ redeems everything: not only man, but the world that has fallen alongside him. It is a sanctification of both spirit and matter, which is also what makes Christ's sacrifice so meaningful. Docetism on the other hand (which largely intersects with gnostic interpretations of the Gospel) trivializes the Cross by making it a metaphysical trick.

>>24480010 (OP)
Worth reading if you're genuinely interested in how
>modern Christianity and/or Judaism came to exist
>radically different people's readings of biblical texts can be as opposed to contemporary interpretations
>the meeting point between ancient Philosophy used to contemplate the nature of Christ.
Otherwise if you're not interested in any of those then it'll be extremely unsatisfying to bother with since basically no existing gnostic text is complete and a lot of the context behind them is just educated guesses at the moment

>>24480010 (OP)
It's nonsense, a handful of fragments that even secular Biblical scholars "deboonk" that's used to justify a NRM akin to Neo-Paganism. They lure you in a with the idea that it's just a pessimistic "real" version of Christianity, then dump a syncretic pantheon on you that makes actual Christianity look like Moore by comparison. Like neo-Paganism, there's no depth to it, it's just fragments stitched together so /x/ schizos and New Age hippies can impose their modern ideologies upon it. If you want to be a Christian, be a Nicene Christian. If you want to be an anti-natalist or some sort of apophatic nihilist, nobody's stopping you. But don't just jam the two incompatible worldviews into a blender and use a long-dead heresy to give it some pseudo-religious justification.

>>24482346
>a handful of fragments
>thirteen codices in the Nag Hammadi alone
Granted, not all are hard line Gnostic texts, but the vast majority are. This board is deader than dead

>>24482346
How about the ante-Nicene Christianity this website talks about

https://ante-nicenechristianity.com/

>>24480032
This.

>>24482186
>>modern Christianity and/or Judaism came to exist
You retard.

Modern Judaism is the Pharsees' traditions which were written down in the Talmud.

>>24480010 (OP)
Gnosticism is basically atheism for zoomers. Everyone on this website rambling about it discovered it either through an /x/ MS Paint comic or some anime like Neon Genesis Evangelion.

>>24480151
>Such a blatantly satanic worldview would have never gained traction before the internet

Except that it has numerous times in the past. The Valentinians (whose namesake quite literally almost became the Pope)? The Cathars? Theosophists? Steiner and the Anthroposophists who continue to operate to this day? Late 1800s spiritualism? Countless small openly gnostic groups operating across the West from 1900 to 1990.

>>24484036
Even the pneuma that is present here, on basketweaving enthusiast grounds. Is it not that olde crafty daemon fashioning ropes over the abyss out of thin memetic nothingness? The very mascot is another rendition of the spirit of the depths.

>>24484036
The Manichaeans, Bogomils, Mandaeans, Marcionites, etc. The Sethian Apocryphon of John also had a very wide readership. We have a number of surviving manuscripts. It is the closest we have to a Gnostic bestseller.

Offtopic? But I remember reading about abraxas for the first in Demian form Hesse, u don't remember why it was mentioned

>>24480010 (OP)
It is worth reading about, but ultimately rejecting material reality is evil, and you should only study gnosticism insofar as a path to discern evil. If you are somebody who finds themselves easily seated by what you read, I'd advise against you reading into gnosticism personally.

Of course I'd recommend a deep dive into what we might call "exoteric theology" before you begin reading into gnosticism, with a focus on the neoplatonists, Christian or otherwise.

>>24484382
>It is worth reading about, but ultimately rejecting material reality is evil, and you should only study gnosticism insofar as a path to discern evil.
What a ridiculous thing to believe.

>>24484409
That it is worth reading, that rejecting material reality is evil, or that you should study gnosticism to be able to discern evil?

>>24484452
That rejecting the world is evil, and you should study gnosticism to get better at discerning evil.

>>24484457

Pretty much study anything other than Abrahamic religion if you're looking to discern evil. Rejecting the world, or at least social doctrines linked to materialism, is pretty much the basis of all spirituality.

Pretty much the only Christians that ever get close to that are the Eastern Orthodox guys, but that's only ever the monks that embrace the more esoteric stuff that the laymen and priests don't.

>>24484550
>Pretty much the only Christians that ever get close to that are the Eastern Orthodox guys
The Desert Fathers? The Pachomians? Encratites? The monasteries of Syria and Palestine?

It's basically just a I hate abrahamism type of thing. That's really clear if you read it. "Aaahhhh I hate the god of Jacob aaaaah." Most likely not much of the gnostic stuff has ever been said by Christ.

>>24484457
Life is intrinsically good, rejecting the world outright comes with the ontological presupposition that life is evil. Gnostic teaching don't just reject being materialistic, they reject life itself.

offtopic. take this crap to /his/. Also...
>hurr durr what is the one true religion
as if anyone knows, dumbass.
>>24484650
have you looked around yourself lately? life sucks. existence is a punishment. creation was a mistake.

>>24484650
>Life is intrinsically good
If life were intrinsically good, it wouldn't need to cause harm to survive. Gnostics reject the world which mandates consumption, not life.

>>24480010 (OP)
Both, honestly.

>>24484650

So do Buddhists.
So do Jainists.

Hell, most eastern religions in general end up being in this camp. Daoists encourage their followers to stop participating in society and normal life and focus on the spiritual beyond the world. Hindus ultimately seek to escape the cycle of reincarnation (ceasing to exist in the material world), even if they don't outright hate the world. This attitude even ends up in some forms of Christianity. See >>24484550

Judaism, western Christianity and non-Sufi schools of Islam are the only religions that preach the goodness of the material world (even if it is fallen). The Abrahamic doctrine of resurrection is always resurrection of the body. A creation of a new Earth. Not an escape to something better.

Its why Jews (including modern Atheist Jews) continue to declare Gnosticism to be inherently antisemitic. Gnosticism explicitly rejects the Jewish God of Abraham (labeled the Demiurge) and the world made by the Jewish God. Those schools of Gnostic thought which feature Jesus or Christ (too many to list) always interpret Jesus to represent something other than the Jewish God or the material world.

>>24484550
Anyone that says "Abrahamic" is an ignorant or dishonest retard though.

>>24484701
Jews don't believe in the God of Abraham.

>>24484763

No it isn't. Abraham is the patriarch of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. His God is the God that all three faiths worship. It is the perfect taxonomic term to use if you don't feel like spelling it out each one individually, much less the 6 million sub-factions for each one.

>>24484772

Sure thing bro. Hoffman's work is just another attempt by White Nationalists who don't want to admit they worship a Jewish god to somehow find a way out of their cognitive dissonance.

I have nothing against white nationalism, but its not compatible with Christianity despite the nostalgia that White Nationalists like to appeal to. It either devolves into the "We wuz jews" teachings of the Christian Identity Movement, or Phyletism.

>>24480010 (OP)
Just read Plotinus

>>24484550
What a stupid post. There is no esotericism in Orthodoxy, esoteric and mystical are not synonymous. Rejecting the world is also not the same thing as rejecting materiality. Your understanding of Christian theology is shallow, you don't understand what the sanctification of matter implies

>>24484872

You apparently missed the first part of what I wrote:
>Pretty much the only Christians that ever get close to that [rejection of materialism and the world] are the Eastern Orthodox guys

Translation: they don't do it even if they come close in their doctrines.

Christianity doesn't reject materialism, which is why it isn't the same as Gnosticism (and frankly its the basis of the entire Orthodox vs Gnostic Heresy split), and also the eastern parallels as described by >>24484701

>>24484785
You're just a lying Jew or golem of them, which is why you bring up your boogeyman immediately when your faggot false religion is criticized (or your master's false religion).

And you have no idea what you're even talking about.

>>24484772
It's weird how this fact triggers all the gaytheist and libtard golems of the Jews.

>>24484993
Well, they don't even know what the Bible says on the matter, and when they're confronted with it they just chimp out like that retarded faggot did, kvetching like a Jew kvetching about wypipo despite being completely off topic.
>I. John 2:23 Whosoever denieth the Son, the same hath not the Father: (but) he that acknowledgeth the Son hath the Father also.
>II. John 1:9 Whosoever transgresseth, and abideth not in the doctrine of Christ, hath not God. He that abideth in the doctrine of Christ, he hath both the Father and the Son.

>>24484785
>abandon your morals because of another "this argument again" from some guy on /x/ or /lit/
>jews are destroying your culture
>other foreigners are invading them
>they commit every kind of ungodliness and blasphemy against Christ and his flock constantly
>but I'm blaming this on God and you because I think turn the other cheek means don't speak truth to lies and don't physically defend yourself from invaders and terrorists
>entire understanding of Christianity comes from Zionist shills who say God like it's a tourettes tick that triggers more when they're talking about geopolitics or being asked an uncomfortable question
>entire threads of just this, every day, on at least two entire boards

>>24480010 (OP)
>shaman gobbledygook
every religion it's just that

>>24480010 (OP)
>is it just early shaman gobbledygook
No it's many different flavors of early christian gobbledygook mixed with late platonic gobbledygook
They are worth a read if you want to have a better idea of spiritual landscape of the late classical period and how diverse early Christianity was
It is more interesting and internally consistent than main line Orthodox Christianity, I give them that

>>24480206
Filtered lil nigga

>>24484658
Life is good, you have the power to choose to suffer or not to suffer, creation is great, and I love being alive

>>24484662
"If life were intrinsically good, I wouldn't stub my toe."

>>24484701
Buddhists, Jainists, Hindus, and Daoists do not believe that life is evil in itself,

At best, most Buddhist schools believe that life causes suffering and is not worth it, not that the material world and life are evil in and of themselves
Jainists believe our "realm" is neutral
Hindus hold that escape from the cycle is a higher good than reincarnation, not that the material world is evil
Daoists believe that the eternal Dao is everything, including life, and that it is good

But there are more religions than just Indian and Abrahamic

Hellenic Paganism didn't teach that the material world was evil
Germanic Paganism didn't teach that the material world was evil
The Zoroastrians didn't teach that the material world was evil
Sikhs don't teach that the material world is evil

I could go through and name like 1000 different religious traditions that don't agree with the gnostics. The gnostics are just about the most radical in their rejection of the material world.

>>24486356
And that’s why I don’t really take the literalist view of Gnosticism, it seems to be a matter of perception of the material and our understanding of it being evil instead, I would say that we are the demiurge

>>24486106
Voegelin's a cornball. Modernity is a Cartesian phenomenon. Nobody out there is fracking for Sophia. Give it a rest.

>>24486356
>>24486747
The need for food can't be a consequence of faulty perception. The whole "the Demiurge is the ego" thematic is dilutive.

The Buddhists compare samsara to a pit of embers, and sensuality to a flayed cow tormented by insects.

The Orphics were proto-gnostic pagans. Their anthropogeny bears a striking resemblance to its Gnostic counterparts.

The Jains believed samsara is a prison and that suffering is the fuel of life.

Various early Christian groups not traditionally associated with the Gnostics, like the Encratites, believed the world is a creation of the Devil.

That these traditions lacked the more overt moralizing tone of the Gnostics doesn't mean their rejection of the world was any less compromising, or an anomaly.

>muh stubbed toe, I love being alive
You can choose to suffer but not to not feel pain.

>>24480010 (OP)
>Is Gnosticism worth reading about
There's a gorllion gnostic schools, so you'll be reading for a while if you want to know what every last one of them claims.

The gnostic take is that this secret wisdom will teach you how to escape this stinky prison dimsension run by extradimensional archons that want to milk your spiritual prostate for pneumatic cum. The Christian take is that it's all just the first lie ("Ye shall be as gods!") rewritten and resold in convoluted forms by fallen angels, unclean spirits, and their human servants. The cynical take is that it's half made-up bullshit, half poorly-understood content from dead mystery religions, and peddled by kooks, druggos, and fraudsters.

It's a big time investment, but the real downside is that you might have to talk to actual self-proclaimed gnostics and New Age retards, who are some of the most obnoxious and deliberately obscurantist faggots in existence. Talking to edgy Satanists is less grating.

>>24486852
To add: Gnostic soteriology is immanentist, not transcendental. One seeks within, not without. The Pleroma is the internal spiritual reality of the Spirit decoupled from Matter. Divine knowledge is self-knowledge, self-knowledge is divine knowledge.

Modernity is a negation of Gnosticism's negation of paganism and Judaism. If modernity is Gnostic, then it's also Christian, since secularism is a negation of Christianity's negation of paganism.

According to Peuch's essay on Gnostic temporality, the schools unanimously held time and history in contempt. So Voegelin's dichotomy of "transcendental" and "immanentizing" forms of Gnosticism doesn't pass muster. There's no world-historical element in the ancient traditions, so him trying to construct a throughline from, say, Valentinianism to Marxism is just bad scholarship.

Even if you don't agree with Peuch, you can read Jeffrey Bingham's The Tyranny of Time? where he argues Peuch was working off an incomplete, pre-Nag Hammadi picture of the tradition and that the Gnostics had complex, even positive, conceptions of temporality. But even those schools who had more charitable interpretations of history never lapsed into world-historicism. Those schools with a cosmic eschatology, like the Sethians, used it to mirror the personal eschatological vision of the soul ascending through the planetary spheres. Where the True God does utilize history for his salvation plan, He only does so to actualize the stillborn Aeons born in the wake of Christ's descent into the Kenoma. There isn't a hint of "immanentizing the eschaton" or terraforming the planet for human pleasure and comfort anywhere.

It's because Europeans and Americans can only project their cultural sickness onto dualisms of every stripe that Voegelin exists, since they can't conceive of what a soteriological dualism actually entails. You see it in Pynchon. The overarching conflict of his novels is between a Faustian cabal of scientists, engineers, bureaucrats, etc. who want to reform the causality of Nature into their own image, and a resistance faction of Orphic naturalists who stand for the Earth. Except he's got it the other way around: Gnostics would resist Archontic instrumentality, and the Archons would be the terraforming/negentropic faction.

>The primary feature that characterizes a tendency as gnostic for Voegelin is that it is motivated by the notion that the world and humanity can be fundamentally transformed and perfected through the intervention of a chosen group of people (an elite), a man-god, or men-Gods. The Übermensch is the chosen one who has a kind of special knowledge (like magic or science) about how to perfect human existence.

>In both cases specifically analyzed by Voegelin, the totalitarian impulse is derived from the alienation of the individuals from the rest of society. That leads to a desire to dominate (libido dominandi), which has its roots in the Gnostic's conviction of the imperative of his vision but also in his lack of concord with a large body of his society. As a result, there is very little regard for the welfare of those who are harmed by the resulting politics, which ranges from coercive to calamitous (such as the English proverb: "You have to crack a few eggs to make an omelet" or its Russian variety: "When you chop wood, chips fly").

This is just egregiously bad scholarship. Gnostic elitism is a spiritual elitism based on the recognition that there exist those who are constitutively incapable of discerning the need and urgency for salvation. You see this typology of pneumatic/psychic/hylic more or less echoed in the Buddhism and its "dust in the eye" metaphor. Jainism also accepts that some individuals are eternally lost. And alienation leads to totalitarianism only in the pathological personality. In the healthy individual, it leads to renunciation. Gnostic alienation has more in common temperamentally with the Buddhist samvega than Marxist alienation. Lord save me from these pseuds!