Christian Gnosticism

In Riven, for instance, the whole world was infused with Christian gnosticism, and the puzzles formed a recognizable constellation if you adopted that particular mind-set.

Modern scholars now reject these theories, while acknowledging that many of the features of later Christian gnosticism can be drawn from pre-Christian Jewish and Hellenistic roots.

In the same way, Scholem produced the hypothesis that the source of the 13th century Kabbalah was a Jewish gnosticism that preceded Christian gnosticism.

After receiving the Ph.D. from Harvard in 1970 and accepting a faculty position at Barnard College, Columbia University, I worked almost exclusively on early Christian gnosticism.

Others may consider Brahma to be more similar to the demiurge of Christian gnosticism, in that he (at least initially) wrongly thought himself as the "Creator" and also as the highest or even the only god.

In some versions of Christian gnosticism, especially those deriving from Valentinius, a lesser deity known as the Demiurge had a role in the creation of the material world in addition to the role of the Monad.

The school teaches a form of modern Christian Gnosticism which is based upon the ideas and imagery of Rosicrucianism, the beliefs of the Cathars and other forms of religio-mystical thought such as Hermeticism and Alchemy.