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The Gnostics and Their Remains

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Author Topic: The Gnostics and Their Remains  (Read 4570 times)
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Demiurge
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δημιουργός (dēmiourgós, latinized demiurgus δήμιος


« Reply #180 on: March 13, 2009, 03:13:15 pm »

bell, and the surplice--omitting unfortunately the frequent and complete ablutions enjoined by the older ritual. The holy image still moves in procession as when Juvenal laughed at it (vi. 530), "Escorted by the tonsured, surpliced, train." Even her proper title "Domina," exact translation of the Sanscrit Isi, survives with slight change, in the modern "Madonna" (Mater-Domina). By a singular permutation of meaning the flower borne in the hand of each, the lotus, former symbol of perfection (because in leaf, flower, fruit, it gave the figure of the Circle, as Jamblichus explains it), and therefore of fecundity, is now interpreted as signifying the opposite to the last--virginity itself. The tinkling sistrum, so well pleasing to Egyptian ears, has unluckily found a substitute in that most hideous of all noise-makers, the clangorous bell. But this latter instrument came directly from the Buddhistic ritual in which it forms as essential a part of the religion as it did in Celtic Christianity, where the Holy Bell was the actual object of worship to the new converts. The hell in its present form was unknown to the Greeks and Romans; its normal shape is Indian, and the first true bell-founders were the Buddhist Chinese. Again relic-worship became, after the third century, the chief form of Christianity throughout the world; which finds its parallel in the fact that a fragment of a bone of a Buddha (that is, holy man in whom the deity had dwelt during his life) is actually indispensable for the consecration of a dagobah, or temple of that religion; equally as a similar particle of saintliness is a sine quâ non for the setting-up of a Roman-Catholic altar.

Very curious and interesting would it be to pursue the subject, and trace how much of Egyptian, and second-hand Indian, symbolism has passed over into the possession of a church that would be beyond measure indignant at any reclamation on the part of the rightful owners. The high cap and hooked staff of the Pharaonic god become the mitre and crosier of the bishop; the very term, Nun, is Coptic, and with its present meaning: the erected oval symbol of productive Nature, christened into the Vesica piscis, becomes the proper framework for pictures of the Divinity: the Crux ansata, that very expressive emblem of the union of the Male and Female

p. 175

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"And he is impious in his arrogance which is in him. For he said, 'I am God and there is no other God beside me,' for he is ignorant of his strength, the place from which he had come."- Yaltabaoth
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