The Gnostic Crucifixion

by G. R. S. Mead

The gentle contempt of those who had entered into the mystery, for those unknowing ones who would fain limit the crucifixion to one brief historic event, is brought out strongly, and savours, though mildly, of the bitterness of the struggle between the two great forces of the inner and spiritualizing and the outer and materializing traditions.

1. The disciples flee after beholding the inner mystery of the Passion and At-one-ment as set forth in the initiating drama of the Mystic Dance which formed the subject of our fourth volume.

2. Yet even John the Beloved, in spite of this initiation, cannot yet bear the thought that his Master did actually suffer historically as a malefactor on the physical cross. In his distress he flees unto the Mount of Olives, above Jerusalem.

But to the Gnostic the Mount of Olives was no physical hill, though it was a mount in the physical, and Jerusalem no physical city, though a city in the physical. The Mount, however it might be distinguished locally, was the Height of Contemplation, and the bringing into activity of a certain inner consciousness; even as Jerusalem here was the Jerusalem below, the physical consciousness.

3. The sentence “when He was hung on the tree of the Cross” contains a great puzzle. The word for “tree” in the original is batos; this may mean the “bush” or “tree” of the cross. But the Cross for the Gnostics was a living symbol. It was not only the cross of dead wood, or the dead trunk of a tree lopped of its branches—a symbol of Osiris in death; it was also the Tree of Life, and was equated with the “Fiery Bush” out of which the Angel of God spake to Moses—that is the Tree of Fiery Life, in the Paradise of man’s inner nature, whence the Word of God expresses itself to one who is worthy to hear. And this Tree of Life was also, as the Cross, the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil; indeed, both are but one Tree, for the fruit of the Tree of Life is the knowledge of good and evil, the cross of the opposites.

But seeing that the word batos in Greek had also another meaning, the Gnostics, by their method of mystical word-play, based on the power of sound, brought this further meaning into use for the expansion of the idea. The difference of accentuation and of gender (though the reading of the Septuagint is masculine and not feminine as is usual with batos in the sense of bush or tree) presented no difficulty to the word-alchemy of these allegorists.

Hippolytus, in his Refutation of all Heretics, attempts to summarize a system of the Christianized Gnosis which is assigned to the Docetæ; and Docetism is precisely the chief characteristic of our Acts of John, as we have already pointed out in Vol. IV. In this unsympathetic summary there is a passage which throws some light on our puzzle. It would, of course, require a detailed analysis of our hæresiologist’s “refutation” of the Docetic system to make the passage to which we refer (op. cit., viii., 9) fully comprehensible; but as this would be too lengthy an undertaking for these short comments, we must content ourselves with a bald statement.

The pure spiritual emanations or ideas or intelligences of the Light descend into the lowest Darkness of matter. For the moulding of vehicles or bodies for them it is necessary to call in the aid of the God of Fire, the creative or rather formative Power, who is “Living Fire begotten of Light.”

Hippolytus summarizes, doubtless imperfectly, from the Docetic document that lay before him, as follows:

“Moses refers to this God as the Fiery God who spake from the Batos, that is to say, from the Dark Air; for Batos is all the Air subjected to Darkness.”