Good morning ladies, gentlemen, and those of you who know better! I am the enchanting Artemis, and this is the laughing craft. I recently mentioned something called “Gnosis” and today I’m going to explain it in greater detail. At the very least, I’m going to try to. It’s a very strange concept that is deliberately esoteric and mercurial. It originally meant “Knowledge” in the sense of a supreme enlightenment. It was used in this sense back when Jesus was a recent topic instead of being the global superstar we all recognize. In modern parlance it means “the state in which magick is doable”. Is that state one of euphoric excitement? Absolute exhaustion? Vacuous indifference? The assistance of cosmic momentum? Yes, but only sometimes. Magick is weird.
A good place to start a difficult topic is the beginning, and that’s the ancient umbrella term of “Gnositicism”. Gnosticism is best understood, in summation at least, with a simple analogy. Imagine the modern New Age ideologies but in Rome around the second century CE. Various cults (small religious practices) have specific histories and mythological frameworks, but many have a set up similar to a popular action movie series. The material world is an illusion, the maker is either mean or dumb because of all the flaws in the illusion, and achieving liberation called “Gnosis” by attaining wisdom is the main goal. There are many traditions and cults under the umbrella of Gnositicism, they all have nuances and divergent beliefs. For just an older definition of Gnosis, this is the relevant historical information.
The modern use of “Gnosis” is much more practical in theory. It can be described in any number of ways with any of the paradigms I mentioned in Don’t Panic. This is because at its core Gnosis is “when you make the magick happen”. If it’s a placebo, a mysterious energy in the body, or if our actions are four dimensional theatre performances for a mystical patron that grants wishes; whatever the explanation of it works for you it can be obtained in a few methods. It can be obtained with excitement, exhaustion, vacuous indifference, or the uncanny momentum of unexpected turns of fortune.
The excitement is the most pleasant means, personally speaking. You might remember from my Inevitable Sigil Post that famed comic book writer Grant Morrison asked patrons of their series “The Invisibles” to rub one out to a sigil to ensure their comic stayed in print. The height of a sexual climax is the moment one might achieve Gnosis. I say might because you need to focus for the duration of the orgasm. If you draw a sigil, then just randomly crank out baby batter afterward for funsies, then congrats! You have a weird doodle and unrelated genetic material to clean up. Intoxication can also achieve Gnosis through excitement. I can’t go into detail because I can neither recall how I’ve managed it, nor do I want to advocate any form of substance abuse.
Exhaustion is, unsurprisingly, the least fun in my opinion. This method has more specific variations on how to get your brain from mundane clay to mystical fire, but they all involve draining your physical energy reserves to get to that sweet, sweet wish fulfillment. Because it involves extreme physical stress I can’t say I’m surprised that boomer magicians haven’t mentioned it. Dancing, whether to shamanic drum beats or your favorite 80’s hit, is a fun expression of exhaustion based Gnosis. While I don’t do it often, I’ve been known to make a sigil and do as many push ups as I can over it. After I literally can’t do any more push ups, I dab my sweat on the sigil thus anointing it with my Gnosis.
Vacuous indifference is hard to pin down by its aloof ambivalence. It is the hardest to describe, for me at least, because magick is about “knowing” what you “want”, the two qualities most opposed to vacuity and indifference respectively. This is a method that essentially outsources the generation of Gnosis to the subconscious. It works best with the channeling method of sigilization in this regard because you have to think about not thinking. Divinations that essentially work as a spirit phone call and mental projection workings also make use of this method because it involves releasing conscious control relative to the spell.
The previously mentioned methods involve you doing something to get from not-magic to Magick. This final method isn’t a “how to get it”, rather it’s a “what to do when you get it”. This final method, assistance from cosmic momentum, is when Gnosis achieves you. For whatever reason, in my experience, there are times when a stray bolt of heavenly inspiration strikes me and I need to do some magick about it. It’s not excitement, exhaustion, or indifference. It works just the same regardless. What I do, when this occurs, is I think of my greatest current need. Start with earthly matters and go through the elemental checklist going up. If your physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual needs are all accounted for: don’t rub it in and use it to further your ultimate spiritual goal. Enlightenment, finding God, or discovering the secret of immortality. After all, Gnosis is about knowledge.
I’ve begun keeping kosher recently. My last two partners, a Cancer and a Scorpio, were toxic as fuck. So I’m just avoiding shellfish for a little bit.