Whose Gnosis is it, Anyway?

In her chapter in “Probing Women and Penetrating Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe” (Hanegraaff and Kripal 2008, pp 231-279), Allison Coudert notes the gendered language used to describe the search for occult knowledge: ‘the investigator peers, pierces, and finally penetrates to “the heart of” the matter.’ (231). ‘The one who probes and penetrates is male and the one penetrated is female’ (231) and thus the search for knowledge itself is coded as male; and, as we shall see in this chapter, the so-called masculine realms (of knowledge and intellect as opposed to body and emotion) continue to be seen as the appropriate areas of academic study of esotericism.

In her article “Is There a Feminine Gnosis?” Karen Voss considers the titular question in depth. She argues that, if there is a gnosis that is ‘feminine’, it is one of repression, a sort of magical liberation theology (Voss 1991, 5-24).  Despite the article appearing in Aries her examples are drawn from Christianity and literature, not esotericism. Further, her concepts of gnosis are firmly neo-platonic. Despite noting the importance of cultural repression Voss, as Althaus-Reid might say, is guilty of attempting to do this liberation theology while keeping her pants on. In all her discussion of whether certain liberationary forms of gnosis might be categorised as ‘feminine’, Voss does not consider the implications of living in a body that has been categorised as ‘not male’. Such a negative approach to defining gender is rarely used, but it articulates something important for historical exploration of gender; for, historically, woman has been defined as ‘not-man’, female as ‘not-male’. Woman is the opposition, the ultimate Other to the masculine norm (personified in esoteric tradition as Adam Kadmos, a so-called androgyne that erases the experiences involved in female bodies).

Hidden narratives govern the forms in which we understand and write history. The study of Esotericism is governed by the structures of the historical ‘grand narrative’ (a narrative of tradition and progress) and of the Campbellian hero’s journey. The study of esotericism traces relationships and traditions; yet there is no grand narrative for women in esotericism that doesn’t follow variations of the victim or liberation paradigms, neither of which can give an accurate picture. Thus we come to ask ourselves, with Voss, What would a feminine gnosis look like? If we are to construct (or uncover) a feminine gnosis we must employ critical theory, feminist theory, queer and post-colonial theories, and Kleinian readings. We must analyse contemporary goddess-centric movements and theologies in a critical way, placing primary importance on bodily experience; where there is no text, we must come to recognise the body as text. 

For there is a recognisable feminine initiation narrative (that is, a feminine gnosis) that can be uncovered, dredged up from the western tradition (the tea leaves left at the bottom of the wastepaper basket of culture, once Hanegraaff pulled out all of the sheaves). As Thomas Laqueur notes,

it is[…] disingenuous to write a history of sexual difference, or difference generally, without acknowledging the shameful correspondence between particular forms of suffering and particular forms of the body, however the body is understood[…] pain and injustice are gendered and correspond to corporeal signs of sex is precisely what gives importance to an account of the making of sex.

We must ask ourselves, what of the heroine’s descent? Sylvia Brinton Perera claims the passage of descent and return as an initiatory narrative for women (Brinton Perera 1981, 7-8) yet it has remained invisible to the esoteric academy, finding articulation only in psychotherapy. This initiation, this gnosis, symbolised in Innana becoming a “side of green, rotting meat,” (Brinton Perera 1981, 9) is an embodied thing. Not embodied in the sense of secondary sex characteristics, but embodied in the sense that that shame is felt deep inside the body, is lived with, is used as the foundation for identity (Dolezal 2016, 45-46) Reconciliation, the movement away from this, is an equally embodied thing. Narratives of feminine redemption through descent (Perrera cites the myths of Innana, Persephone, and Eurydice: the same pattern can be noted in the grail story, too) tell of the subject being acted-upon, thrust into trials, and coming face-to-face with the monstrous visage of the dark mother. According to Voss and Perrera, the feminine gnosis is an oppositionally-created thing. This makes feminine gnosis a form of esoteric liberation theology. It is also thus a thing about bodies (Perrera notes the particularly visceral aspect of many of her client’s dreams); and it is about women’s bodies because that is what historically has separated them from men. Arguably, this feminine gnosis has remained invisible within the academy because it is embodied. It has few texts because it is not only a repressed gnosis, but is equally a gnosis of repression. 

Contested Bodies

The relationship between esoteric ideas, the academic Study of Esotericism, and the cultural current called Neo-Platonism has been reasonably well documented. However something that has been given far less attention is the way that neo-platonic metaphysics influence the work of many contemporary scholars of esotericism. Consciousness, imagination, vision, emotion, understanding, knowledge; these categories do no exist independent of the body, but are experiences that are fundamentally embodied. There can be no imagination, no capacity for vision, no understanding, without the physical grey matter of the brain, and the intricate network of the nervous system. Despite what Descartes’ famous experiment might imply, the brain is an inextricable part of the body. Even if we were all living in a virtual reality (as in The Matrix), this would still affect our bodies. We would still experience endorphins as we fell off a building or fell in love; we would shed tears if our loved one died. The embodied nature of consciousness, and therefore all esoteric phenomena, has so far been an epistemological blind spot within the study of Esotericism, particularly, and ironically, when it comes to psychological models of magic. 

The study of Esotericism is, at its heart, the study of gnosis. Gnosis is one of several Greek words for knowledge; it means direct, experiential knowledge of the divine. Esotericism approaches gnostic experience from a post-liberal, individualistic ontology that is both neo-platonic, and is haunted by a descartian dualism. It talks about gnosis as a psychological experience, an altered state of consciousness; but gnosis is equally an altered state of physicality, and of bodily experience―hence its characteristic incommunicability. Gnosis is knowledge that is deeply experiential; that cannot be communicated in an objective paradigm. Gnosis is world-building, person-building, constitutive. In order to speak about gnosis authentically, or even meaningfully, we must speak about it in relation to our own, embodied experiences. Now this all seems to have little to do with the female body; but understanding this claim of objectivity in the face of gnosis is fundamental to understanding the erasure of the female body in this field. Because―and this is a truism of western academia―the so-called objective position is in fact a faux-androgynous masculine position. And this becomes clear as soon as we begin to explore what has been said of women within esotericism in any detail.

There is no objective observer; it is not possible to take the god’s-eye view of history (Voss 1993, 15), for the history we seek is not that of the winners, but the losers. As long as history is researched as though the researcher has a gods-eye view, the problem will remain, and the implications (for the gendered body―that is, the body-that-is-not-male) will remain. Academics seem to think themselves exempt from these theoretical logics of writing—but they are not. Though academic and creative writing can be distinguished, they are not distinct—critical theory makes this clear. Thus the historical focus of esotericism is a false flag, a red herring. It allows academics to work without tackling the difficult questions of their own relationships with the subject. The study of esotericism critically needs to integrate the insight that feminist, post-colonial and critical theories have given to the humanities. However, working with these perspectives necessitates acknowledging the modes of repression that are implicated both in the history of esotericism, and in its contemporary scholarly manifestation (which shares with theology the impossibility of separating the subject from scholarly work on it). Refusing to acknowledge these difficult truths, the study of esotericism operates in a quasi-19th century bubble, with all considerations of gender and embodiment being firmly relegated as ‘women’s stuff’. It seems to me to be no coincidence that in the past few years there has been a proliferation of scholarly texts on fascism and traditionalism, but only a minor focus on feminism and women’s polis. Voss, in her piece of feminine gnosis, discusses transformative (or missionary) and bibliographic modes of scholarship (Voss 1991,14). To this dichotomy, I would add a third: the traditionalist or preserving one. This is the ghost that haunts the study of esotericism; the fear of conversion, the fear of becoming that which is studied. We want so bad to maintain a separation between scholar and subject, but this line, so desperately drawn, does not really exist. We scholars of esotericism are as much part of the great mass of occulture as are ‘insta-witches’ or occult artists. As Hansen so perceptively noted when speaking of the academic dismissal (and even bullying) of sexologist and anthropologist Eric Dingwall, scholars must distance themselves from the very phenomena which they study in order to maintain their status within the academy (Hansen 2001). But as scholars begin to excavate the history of women within esotericism, it becomes increasingly clear that there is theoretical and critical work to be done in order to understand the way (following the logic of Barthes in The Pleasure of the Text) that women’s bodies can themselves be seen as texts―and that texts themselves are a form of body. Indeed what is required if we are to talk about intimate female experience is an ecriture feminine in the manner described by Helene Cixous (Cixous, 1976).  We must take a page out of the work of the French post-structuralists and, as scholars, analyse our own bodies and experiences as sites of politics, knowledge and magic.

The text is a body without organs―or rather, it relies on and utilises the organs of others, and in doing so pulls them bodily into the text. This is not to say that we should write propaganda instead of history, but that we must be eternally aware of our own bodies, aware of the way our body enters into the body of text, and aware of the way all readers enter into the text through their bodies. In fact, we scholars must become aware of the interrelated, ethical facet of writing itself. This is the unexpressed at stake in the knowledge economy: knowledge does not exist independently. There is no platonic form of truth. There is only embodied knowledge. Sharing this knowledge is a mode of interrelating, and thus writing is necessarily an ethical act.