MAY 19 - 25, 2005

Exile in Godville
Profile of a postmodern heretic
by A.W. HILL

On May 7, 2004, as dusk was falling, a plume of

black smoke as big and ornery as a Texas twister
rose above Los Angeles. And though no one later
raved on local talk radio that he’d seen the face of
the devil in the ominous cloud, a knowing
onlooker in a sufficiently altered state might well
have glimpsed the Whore of Babylon, the face of
the eternal Rome to which Philip K. Dick referred Stephan Hoeller is the counter-
when he famously wrote: “The Empire never cardinal of an L.A. nobody knows,
and until fire destroyed his
ended.” church, he was the bishop of
Hollywood Boulevard.
The rundown, two-story building at 4516 (Photos by Slobodan Dimitrov)
Hollywood Boulevard, which for 27 years had
been the peculiar home of Bishop Stephan A.
Hoeller’s Ecclesia Gnostica, was in flames. No one was injured, and the vessels of communion
were salvaged, but unbeknownst to most, a landmark of hidden Hollywood had been lost. In this
tiny hole-in-the-wall of a chapel, to the streetside accompaniment of bleating horns, sirens and the
occasional gunshot, the gnomish and erudite Dr. Hoeller had held forth most every Friday night on
subjects ranging from Kabbalah and Sufism to the psychedelic sacraments of Eleusis. And on
each Sunday, he’d lighted the incense, donned his vestments and conducted a mass that was
Catholic in all but its subtly subversive liturgy, for Hoeller is a Gnostic, and the sole American
bishop consecrated by the Duc de Palatine, mysterious bearer of the English Gnostic
Transmission.

The word is gnostic (nah-stick), from the Greek gnosis (inner knowledge), and as opposed to
agnostics, who claim to know nothing of the divine, Gnostics are privy to a secret both terrible and
wondrous. It is a knowledge that has kept them underground for 1,800 years, tarred as heretics by
the Christian orthodoxy. It’s hard to say whether or not Cardinal Roger Mahony has ever heard of
Stephan Hoeller, but it’s not difficult to imagine that there are nights when he wakes to see a
shadow on the wall, an elfin shadow with a Beat Era goatee and a round belly. Gnosticism is the
dog that nips at Rome’s heels, the orphaned child tugging at its cuffs, reminding the Church of
what — and whom — it left behind. For nearly two millennia, the family secret was safely in the
crypt, but in 1945, as we shall see, the ground shifted, and in the early years of our new century,
thanks in some ironic measure to the very mainstream success of The Matrix and The Da Vinci
Code, the vault burst open. Stephan Hoeller is the counter-cardinal of an L.A. nobody knows, and
until last year’s fire destroyed his church, he was the bishop of Hollywood Boulevard.

In less than one hour, the L.A. outpost of what one Catholic apologist has called “the most dreaded
foe the Christian faith has ever confronted” was in ruins. The size and fury of the blaze belied its
humble origins, but may have been attributable to what the LAPD suspects was a
methamphetamine lab operating in an upstairs apartment. A junkie and her boyfriend had rented
the flat for years, and therein lies an irony that would not be lost on Gnostic sensibilities. The fire
that gutted Hoeller’s sanctuary was not lit by torch-bearing fundamentalists or commandos
employed by Opus Dei, but was the consequence of a modern affliction engendered by the sorrow
of being “trapped,” to paraphrase comic icon Howard the Duck, “in a world we never made.”

Like the Adam and Eve of Gnosticism’s alternative Genesis (see sidebar following article), the
recipient of gnosis awakens one day to the sobering realization that the world we live in is, in
Hoeller’s words, “the flawed creation of a flawed Creator,” and that we are “strangers, lost in a
world that is ill-fitting and absurd.” From that moment on, perception is altered, belief is cast aside
in favor of experience, dogma is abandoned and the search for the True God begins. Oh, yes,
Virginia, there is a God, if not quite the God of your Fathers. This God would not bar you from the
priesthood, or seek to keep you barefoot and pregnant, but this God also might not be invoked by
a Tori Amos song. This God takes some getting used to.

If it’s not apparent how dangerous such an altered worldview is, and why it once led straight to
dungeon and stake, consider this: Just as you can’t smoke a joint and take a politician seriously,
you can’t experience gnosis and take the business of the world — producing and consuming — to
be of terribly great consequence. Gnosticism embodies the eternal counterculture, and as with
expansion of consciousness by any other means, it has always been a grave threat to the
established order. In the Gnostic Genesis, not only is Eve the heroine and the serpent in effect her
fairy godmother, but the tyrant of Eden is none other than Jehovah, the Old Testament God who
would “have no others before him.” The Gnostics know him as the Demiurge — the “Half-Maker”
— or Ialdabaoth. So who or what, then, is the God of the Gnostics? It is both aeons away, and
closer than we think. It is, to quote Hoeller’s liturgy, “that whose name not but the silence can
express.”

We are through the looking glass, and the disorientation can be profound. But to attend a
Sunday mass at the old Ecclesia Gnostica, you’d have been forgiven for not noticing right away.
Most of the liturgy would be familiar to any Catholic, as would the vestments worn by Bishop
Hoeller and his clergy. Only the place, and perhaps the parishioners, would make you feel you had
picked the wrong door and wandered into a catacomb art-directed by David Lynch and populated
with extras cast by Tim Burton.

There were no flying buttresses or gothic arches at 4516 Hollywood Blvd, only a low-ceilinged,
rectangular room barely 24-by-12-feet, appointed with images of the Babylonian prophet Mani and
the psychoanalytic pioneer Carl Gustav Jung, a draped flag bearing a Templar cross, and an array
of chivalric symbols and Christian icons suggestive of a mode of worship far removed in time. For
a resident of daylight Los Angeles, arriving with Starbucks cup in hand, the very act of crossing the
threshold could seem both furtive and daring, like entering a graveyard after midnight for a
rendezvous or crashing a very private wedding party. But heads never turned to regard the
trespasser, either with false welcome or slit-eyed suspicion. One could enter and leave for months,
as I did, without getting busted. It was a genuine sanctuary.

The parishioners, in those days never more than the room could accomodate, were as off-center
as the locale. Generally over 30, almost invariably unaccompanied, they were the people of the
periphery, those you glimpse in the rearview mirror. The people whose names you never learn: the
tall Asian gentleman whose mystique was undiminished by his frayed collar; the pretty, pensive
young woman, her jaw tight with some concealed anguish; the spinster in the high-collared dress
who had probably read every book in the library. Quiet people, but not conformists. They had two
qualities in common: They were introverts in an extroverted culture, and thereby misfits, and they
had faces that spoke of a somewhat endangered species of intelligence.

The Hollywood Ecclesia Gnostica filled with incense and plainsong as Hoeller entered, wearing his
lavender skullcap and preceded by the cross, just as it does now each Sunday morning in its new
(and considerably more spacious) digs in Atwater Village. The Mass proceeds as it has for
centuries with a Collect (the call to worship), a Lesson, a reading from the Gospel, at first glance
distinguished from the ritual of Saint Peter’s Church only by the presence of both male and female
clergy. But if you listen well, odd things begin to present themselves to your ears, as if the
well-known liturgy were mutating in the heat of the sacrament.

Here, for instance, is the Gnostic take on the prayer known to all Catholics as the Hail Mary (“Hail
Mary, full of grace . . .”):

“Hail, Sophia, filled with light, the Christ is with Thee. Blessed art Thou among the Aeons, and
blessed is the liberator of Thy light, Jesus. Holy Sophia, Mother of all gods, pray to the light for us,
Thy children, now and in the hour of our death. Amen.”

On any given Sunday, such new strains of liturgical DNA emerge from the Mass, with an effect
that’s a good, working definition of subversive. Today, four Sundays after Easter 2005, Bishop
Hoeller opens the service with a whispered invocation that might almost slip the radar of an
inattentive Grand Inquisitor:

“In the name of the unknown Father of the universe, in truth Mother of us all.”

Some 40 congregants have assembled, nearly two-thirds of them female. Bishop Hoeller’s flock
has grown, and although the numbers are small, it seems quite reasonable to think they’ve been
debited from Cardinal Mahony’s side of the ecclesiastical ledger. It’s also impossible not to wonder
how much of this spiritual gender gap might be owed to what Time magazine will sooner or later
dub “the Da Vinci Effect.”

The scriptural reading is from the Gnostic Gospel of Saint Philip, and the passage concludes this
way:
“God created man and man created god. So it is in the world. Men make gods and they worship
their creations. It would be more fitting for the gods to worship men.”

In a brief homily following Holy Communion, Hoeller, seated against the deep, star-sprinkled blue
of the chapel’s rear wall, offers his take on this blasphemous bit of scripture, quoting Voltaire’s
“God created Man and Man returned the favor,” and arguing, from personal experience, that no
greater proof of mankind’s knack for blind worship exists than the events of the “Centum Terribilis,”
the 20th century. As a child, Hoeller watched the demiurgic forces of Nazism and Stalinism come
head-to-head in his native Hungary, and has not forgotten.

Stephan Hoeller grew up in wartime Budapest, the only child of an Austrian baron and a
Hungarian countess, soon to see their ancestral estates appropriated by the Soviet cyclops. As
Hoeller tells it, his devoutly Catholic parents were tolerant of his youthful fascination with the
outlaw philosophies of Simon Magus, Valentinus, Basilides and others whose visions had gathered
like vapors in the cauldron of second-century Alexandria. “Ah, well,” he says, conjuring his father’s
voice. “So the boy is interested in an obscure heresy . . . let him explore. Perhaps one day he’ll
write a book about it.” Indeed, Hoeller’s spiritual rebellion remained mostly academic through his
teens. He went on to study for the Catholic priesthood in Austria and, briefly, in Rome itself. It was
the conjunction of a chance personal encounter in postwar Belgium and a momentous discovery in
Upper Egypt that fanned his own heretical spark into flame. Both events convinced him that the
Gnostic tradition had withstood both the test of time and the slings and arrows of its persecutors.

As a boy, Hoeller’s own access to unfiltered Gnostic writings was

limited to the three “codices” then in existence. One of these, the
Askew Codex, includes the famous Pistis Sophia, the story of
how Sophia (Wisdom), a distinctly feminine emanation of the
godhead, was drawn into the dark sea of chaos by a reflection of
her own radiance, ultimately conceiving through the error of
self-desire the misshapen Ialdabaoth (Childish God), also known
as Samael (Blind God), or Saclas (Foolish God), creator and
Chief Archon of the Lower World. This, not the sin of Eve, is the
Fall that Gnostics mourn, and Sophia herself went to great pains
to reverse it. The revelation of God’s feminine face in this
alternately tender and harrowing myth would have been enough
to rock a Catholic boy’s world. But there was more to come.

Due to suppression and concealment of authentic texts, would-be

Gnostics like Hoeller had been left for more than 17 centuries to comb through the anti-heretical
screeds of early Church fathers for shards of meaning, an exercise which may explain the Gnostic
knack for finding truth in opposites. Then, in December of 1945, it all changed. A fortuitous find in
Upper Egypt brought Gnosticism home to Jesus.
On a cold, moonlit night, Mohammed Ali al-Samman and his brothers sheathed their knives and
set off from the desert village of Nag Hammadi to avenge their father’s murder, stopping en route
to fill their sacks with mineral fertilizer from the great caves at Jabal-al-Tarif, a mountain
honeycombed with hiding places. While digging through the soft soil, they dislodged an
earthenware jar a meter tall, and the rest, as they say, is history. Once Mohammed’s lust for booty
trumped his fear that the jar might contain a jinni, he took a hammer to it and found 13 papyrus
volumes, bound in leather, comprising 52 Coptic translations of sacred texts from the early
Christian era, including “previously unreleased” gospels attributed to the apostles Thomas and
Philip, and, most surprisingly, abundant references to the special status of Mary Magdalene. Once
these fragile manuscripts had made their way through the black market into the hands of biblical
scholars and archaeologists, there was no question of authenticity, only of orthodoxy — with an
edge of shock and awe.

The Gospel of Thomas opens with the enigmatic line, “These are the secret words which the living
Jesus spoke, and which the twin, Judas Thomas, wrote down.” You can almost hear the text’s first
translator, Gilles Quispel, take a gulp. None of these “secret words” had been allowed into the
canon we now know as the New Testament, yet it’s possible they were recorded before Matthew,
Mark, Luke and John put quill to papyrus.

The Jesus who comes across in what are now known as the Gnostic Gospels is less a lawgiver
and moralist than a kind of Zen master–cum–depth psychologist: “If you bring forth what is within
you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not
bring forth will destroy you.” He is alternately loving and stern, playful and sober, even sensual. He
dances, drinks and, in the Gospel of Philip, kisses Mary Magdalene on the mouth, stirring a
hornet’s nest of resentment among his male disciples.

Moreover, the Gnostic Jesus powerfully suggests that the words “I and the Father are One,”
attributed to him in John 10:30, do not describe a unique relationship. Again, from the Gospel of
Thomas: “He who will drink from my mouth will become as I am; I myself shall become he, and the
things that are hidden will be revealed to him.” Anyone who attains gnosis, the knowledge of the
greater self, will know that God resides both in a far country and within us (thanks to Sophia’s
descent), just as in Indian religion, the atman (the soul) is one with boundless Brahman. If this is
what Eve learned from the serpent, it’s no wonder Ialdabaoth wanted her uppity ass off the set.
(See sidebar.) Seasoning his apocalyptic Judaism richly with Tao-like insights, the Christ of the
Gnostic Gospels becomes the augur of the New Age, and “Know Thyself” is the one law that
matters.

Historically speaking, what the Gnostic scriptures reveal is that Christianity in its earliest phase
was far from monolithic. The Church did not, in fact, become “Catholic” until the end of the second
century. In a Mediterranean world with Alexandria as its intellectual capital, Christianity was a
vibrant counterculture, more a new way to be than a new law to obey. At the beating heart of it was
a conviction that the teachings of the Nazarene Jesus had sprung mankind from its prison; that the
fallen world could go to Hell. The imperial right hand of Christ’s new church hammered this into
self-serving dogma; the heretical left hand stirred it into ecstasy. The left hand was amputated and
the Gnostics cast off. A New Rome, the orthodoxy said, could not be built on do-it-yourself
salvation.

The availability of the Nag Hammadi scriptures fueled Hoeller’s own epiphany, but gnosis, in his
words, “originates in an experience of the psyche,” not the intellect. You can’t read your way to
enlightenment. As a refugee in post-war Belgium, still not yet 20, he encountered “live Gnostics”
affiliated with a revived French sect. These mysterious mentors, living in a Europe that still branded
them heretics, befriended him and opened the door to the spiritual kindred he found when, in 1953,
he was admitted to the USA as a “stateless person” and placed in the city of Los Angeles.

In 1958, Hoeller was ordained a priest of the American Catholic Church by the bishop of the
Church of Saint Francis in Laguna Beach. The ACC was a schismatic branch, and decidedly not
on the Vatican’s party list. A year later, Hoeller founded his own parish at Melrose and Western and
christened it Ecclesia Gnostica, drawing a small congregation from attendees of his frequent
lectures at the Philosophical Research Society in Los Feliz. In 1967, while down the street the
Doors held court at the Whisky, a visiting British Gnostic prelate known as Richard, Duc de
Palatine, dubbed Hoeller a bishop of the Pre-Nicene Gnostic Catholic Church. It was the Summer
of Love, and as Hoeller puts it, Gnostics “looked with great interest on the consciousness-raising
endeavors of the counterculture” for signs of a genuine revival of their tradition. He knew by then
what to look for, for only a few years earlier, Hoeller himself had broken on through to the other
side. His faith was now beyond belief. It was a matter of experience.

The vintage Beachwood Canyon apartment Hoeller

has occupied for most of the 51 years since his arrival in
Los Angeles is as paradoxical as its tenant. Scholarly
but unstuffy; modest, yet adorned with emblems of a
noble birth and memorabilia indicative of a nostalgia for
vanished royalty. The living room is a library stocked
with old, hardbound books that reflect a lifelong devotion
to Jung and a youthful embrace of Theosophy and
Freemasonry. In a room that honors French
existentialists, psychedelic pioneers and even the
institution of gay marriage, it is nonetheless not entirely
surprising to spot a Bush-Cheney bumper sticker curled
in the nut bowl, but for reasons as unconventional as David Lynch’s purported admiration for
Ronald Reagan. You don’t find standard left-right polarities in the home of Gnostics: They are the
quintessential contrarians, and Gnosticism transcends any convenient category. Wherever there is
a too-easy consensus, the Gnostic in the room can be counted on to take exception. Then, too,
there is the fact that young Stephan Hoeller saw his father shot point-blank by Joseph Stalin’s
goons and left lying in a pool of his own blood.

In any case, a good Gnostic sees the world as the province of a bumbling, idiot son who mistakes
himself for the real thing, so political affiliation may be a matter of rendering unto Caesar what is
Caesar’s. These days, the word gnostic is on the wind, and on the sometimes windy breath of
pop-culture pundits, so it seems a good time to learn from this learned man about the weirdly
beautiful and unsettling worldview that gave him his calling.

I ask Hoeller about the recent revival of interest in Gnostic themes spawned by popular
phenomena like the Matrix films and The Da Vinci Code, as well as Hollywood’s continuing dance
with literary Gnostics like Philip K. Dick. At 73, Hoeller’s awareness of such things is keen, and he
answers, “Well, I think that we need to remind ourselves, as Jung did, that pop culture is still
culture, and that it reflects whatever is churning in the collective unconscious. Things got a bit
muddy with all the millennium hubbub, but there are authentic expressions of the tradition out
there. It’s a matter, as always, of separating the wheat from the chaff. One can only hope . . .” A
rabbinical tilt of the head, a lifting of brows and a barely audible sigh follow, suggesting that
Hoeller’s heavenly hopes are tempered by a worldly fatalism. If there is a Gnostic among A.A.
Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh characters, it is most certainly Eeyore.

But then, beneath the bushy brows, there is a gleam in his eye, and when talk turns to The Matrix,
it grows brighter. A scenario in which our everyday reality is a digitized illusion projected by
malevolent overlords of AI. Shades of the Demiurge? “Yes,” Hoeller affirms. “The outlines are
there. Especially in the first film, where this notion of a counterfeit reality in which we’re trapped,
and a dark, manipulative will behind the veil, is clearly expressed. Neo seems to be a classic
Gnostic seeker.”

There is something akin to the Hindu concept of maya in all this talk of veiling and illusion, and I
ask him if it’s simply a matter, as the gurus say, of our failure to see things “rightly.” “Yes and no,”
he answers. “As with Hinduism, the ‘righting’ of our perception comes with a change in
consciousness. A jnana, which we call gnosis. But, in general, the Eastern religions don’t
acknowledge that there are malign forces whose interests lie in maintaining the illusion — so well
that most people never see it.”

We never see it, I think out loud, unless there’s a tear in the fabric of our “reality” that suddenly
reveals the Man Behind the Curtain — as when in The Truman Show the spotlight falls from a clear
blue sky and lands at Jim Carrey’s feet.

“ ‘There’s a crack in the world,’ ” adds Hoeller, quoting Leonard Cohen. “That’s how the light gets
in.” The bishop smiles a Mona Lisa smile. “Yes,” he adds. “You see, to cite another chapter from
the Matrix series, the Architect of this illusion is not all that skillful. There are flaws in the blueprint,
fissures in the foundation, through which we can glimpse the supernal reality. But we must be very
attentive, because as soon as a crack appears, the enemies of gnosis — enemies of a direct
human perception of the true nature of God and man — begin to paper or plaster it over.”

Hoeller is speaking of the Demiurge and his cohorts, the Archons, and I cannot stop myself from
asking the agnostic question: Are we talking allegorically here, or should I double-bolt the door
tonight? His answer provokes a shiver, and makes me wonder if M. Night Shyamalan should be
added to the list of Gnostic filmmakers. Hoeller describes these “enemies of gnosis” as “forms of
transpersonal consciousness which have been actualized in some way and have an existence
outside the individual psyche.” In other words, they’re not simply “in our heads.”
For the skeptical (and all Gnostics begin as skeptics), it may be worth noting that no less an
authority on human psychology than Carl Jung wrote that flying saucers were an actualized
projection of both nuclear-age anxiety and the deep longing for wholeness. They were not merely
in our heads either.

Unlike Kabbalah, the mystical strain of Judaism whose mythos of divine emanations and
scattered sparks of God-stuff closely parallels its own, Gnosticism doesn’t have a celebrity
spokesperson like Madonna. That may be partly because its sobering epiphanies don’t lend
themselves to a feel-good conclusion, and partly because Gnostics tend to observe the Zen axiom
that “Those who know don’t say, and those who say don’t know.” But the Gnostic tradition is clearly
enjoying a revival by way of popular culture and cyberspace, and the Gnostic worldview, while
underground for ages, has always been “in vogue” among the intelligentsia. A bold case could be
made that gnosis is the ultimate form of hip, in the sense of knowing the score: You couldn’t ask for
a headier jolt of inside dope than that the god of this world is a fraud. From William Blake to
William S. Burroughs, from Goethe to Henry Miller to P.K. Dick, anyone who’s ever sought his
illumination straight from the source, or doubted that the evil in the world was owed to the “Original
Sin” of one errant couple, has felt the Gnostic twinge. It may be true, as Hoeller asserts, that “any
serious artist is already half a Gnostic.” Certainly, any serious comedian is, comedy being the
rearview mask of angst.

For a “man of the cloth,” Hoeller can be irreverently funny, a sort of ecclesiastical H.L. Mencken.
On the eve of the millennium, he hosted an “End of the World” party that included such “guests” as
clueless ’50s TV prognosticator Criswell (raised from the dead) and outré diva Tequila
Mockingbird. I once heard him quip at a Friday-evening lecture that “a more suitable doctrine for
modern life than utilitarianism would be futilitarianism.” I ask him if he thinks that cutting-edge
comedians like Lenny Bruce and Sam Kinison were Gnostics in their own way. “Well, yes,” he
replies. “Freud wrote that our reaction to a joke was an explosion in the psyche. When a person
gives up the attempt to make sense out of a world that is largely bereft of it, it’s liberating. The
realization that the machine is defective frees us from the constant temptation to tinker with it, and
lightens the soul.”

Well, maybe not for everyone. The pessimism implicit in the Gnostic outlook has made it a tough
sell from the first century onward, with critics asking, essentially, “Where’s the comfort in a religion
that says the inmates are running the asylum?” Hoeller emphatically does not back away from the
controversy when he fumes, “I’m fed up with hearing everyone chant ‘I’m okay, you’re okay, it’s
okay.’ Well, everything is not okay!” And he’s decidedly not prescribing his doctrine as an opiate for
the masses when he cautions, “When encountering Gnosticism in the spiritual supermarket, we
may be tempted to embrace some parts of its worldview and disregard others . . . such as the
presence of evil in the very fabric of the universe.” Although it may be more accurate to
characterize Gnosticism as mystical existentialism than the nihilism it has often been labeled, it’s
clearly an acquired and rarefied taste, like absinthe or Nick Drake or, to cite another cinematic
exorciser, David Lynch.
Lynch’s work has frequently been pegged by film critics as “Manichaean,” and Mani, the third-
century Babylonian prophet who framed the world in terms of the eternal struggle between
co-equal forces of Light and Darkness, is a Gnostic hero. Hoeller has seen Mulholland Drive, and I
have a hunch he might view the gruesome bum with the blue box who occupies the alley behind
Winkie’s Diner as an embodiment of the Demiurge, manipulating reality so as to keep the
characters (and us) from seeing the truth. His reply is Jungian: “I can’t say if David Lynch is familiar
with the writings, but Gnostic archetypes are present in the underground stream of the
subconscious, a place he clearly taps into.”

Aside from its dismissal of Judaic law and its challenge to Papal Writ, one of the things that
undoubtedly drove the suppression of Gnostic scripture was its depiction of “the prostitute,” Mary
Magdalene, as holding equal status with the 12 disciples and special rank with the Son of God
himself. Like Eve, M.M. “gets it” before the guys do, not infrequently prompting grumblings of
“What’s up with her?” This brings us to the zingers breathlessly reported by Dan Brown in the
widely read pages of The Da Vinci Code.

Since Bishop Hoeller is a bona fide scholar of the lore alluded to by the now stupendously rich Mr.
Brown, the question must be posed: Was it some sort of tantric sex thing between J.C. and M.M.?

“Although I’m delighted by the interest in Gnosticism it’s stirred up,” Hoeller says, “and by its part in
restoring Mary Magdalene to her place at the side of Jesus, I must confess that my regard for The
Da Vinci Code is considerably less than for The Matrix. For one thing, Mr. Brown seems to have an
agenda. He appears to be deliberately courting certain ‘interest groups,’ among them conspiracy
buffs, enthusiastic but badly informed Goddess worshippers and almost anyone who harbors a
grudge against the Christian faith. And though the Gnostic Gospels do identify the Magdalene as
having a unique spiritual kinship with Jesus, there’s no suggestion that the relationship was sexual,
much less that it produced offspring. This is a canard derived almost wholly from an earlier piece of
sensationalistic pseudo-history called Holy Blood, Holy Grail.”

“According to which,” I interject, “the bloodline of Jesus produced the French monarchy . . .”

“Yes, well . . . the Merovingian dynasty.”

“And your opinion of the Holy Blood theory?”

“Flapdoodle.”

Nookie or no, the stupendous popularity of The Da Vinci Code has let certain cats out of the bag,
and Hoeller is the first to admit that it could not have found such a ready audience if intimations of
the Divine Feminine were not already percolating through the collective unconscious?. The psychic
tremors from a discovery like the Nag Hammadi texts aren’t felt immediately. By analogy, Einstein’s
Special Theory of Relativity was published in 1905, and most of us are still struggling with the
notion of space-time. But at Nag Hammadi, the dike of orthodoxy, built by the Fathers in part to
keep sexuality and subversive “feminine” elements at bay, sprung a major leak, and the amniotic
waters have been trickling through ever since. Gnosticism’s most formidable and vociferous foe,
Tertullian (155–225 A.D.), may yet have to eat his words on Woman: “You are the devil’s gateway .
. . The sentence of God on your sex lives on in this age; the guilt, necessarily, lives on, too.”
Contrast this misogyny with the gender-bending of Jesus in the Gospel of Thomas: “When you
make the male and the female one and the same . . . then you will enter the Kingdom.”

In spite of Hoeller’s somewhat bristly relationship with feminist theory, the fact that two of his
order’s priests, one deacon and two acolytes are female seems testament enough to his rejection
of ecclessiastical misogyny.

Today, the Gnostic Revival is abetted by a sea change in popular culture that began in the
pre-millennial ’90s: The “alternative” now becomes mainstream in a heartbeat, chaos theory and
quantum uncertainty rule the scientific roost, and no less a scholastic Brahmin than Harold Bloom
calls Gnosticism “America’s native religion.” I ask Hoeller whether he thought that 2,000 years of
persecution had come to an end. His reply is that of one who, in the words of a friend, has “lived
out the myth of the exile” and learned how hard it is to come home.

“We’ve been persecuted because we assert that genuine salvation comes only through an
essential change in consciousness which has nothing to do with obeying rules. This makes
fundamentalists of all stripes crazy, because they’re all about adherence to ‘the Law.’ As long as
this remains true, I suspect we’ll remain outsiders. Gnostics obey the traffic laws like everyone else
. . . we just don’t happen to believe you can get to Heaven that way.”

And what of Rome, I wonder. Will His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI extend a hand to his estranged
Gnostic brethren as his predecessor did to the Eastern Orthodox? “Is the Pope Catholic?” Hoeller
replies, with a twinkle in his eye. “No, he seems to be a damage-control man, and there is plenty of
damage to attend to.”

The last question is the toughest: Once our eyes are open to the absurdity of the world, what do
we live for? It’s essentially the same question asked by Sartre and Camus in the midst of the
Holocaust, but Hoeller’s reply is lit by that glimmer in his eye. He quotes the Gospel of Thomas:

“And Jesus said, ‘Let him who seeks continue seeking until he finds. When he finds, he will be
troubled. When he becomes troubled, he will be astonished, and he will rule over the All.’”

Bishop Stephan Hoeller conducts Sunday services, and lectures at 8:00 p.m. on almost
every Friday night of the year, at Ecclesia Gnostica, in its new location at 3363 Glendale
Blvd. in Atwater Village. He is the author of Gnosticism: New Light on the Ancient Tradition
of Inner Knowing, The Gnostic Jung and The Fool’s Pilgrimage, and can be tracked down at
www.gnosis.org.

Genesis Unplugged
The Fall of Man as seen from the Gnostic perspective
Once upon a very long time ago, when the very first Mommy and Daddy starred in the world’s
first piece of Reality Programming, an unexpected snafu occurred, the sort that drives
producers and program executives nuts. Mommy, whose name was Eve, began to act up. She
began to question the so-called reality of her show, which was known by the title: GENESIS: In
the Beginning.

Eve sat naked on her haunches beneath the forest canopy, alert as always to the sights and
sounds of Eden, while Daddy, who was called Adam, snored bearishly at her side. Adam could
not seem to get enough of the good things in the Garden, and spent much of his day in a
somnolent state, occasionally muttering, in the peculiar argot of those times, “This is as good
as it gets.”

Eve was not so sure. She had seen distorted faces reflected in dewdrops, heard urgent things
in the whisper of the giant ferns. Unsettling things. She had sensed the presence of Others.
And yet, there were no others, were there? Surely, the watchful eyes of the timid tree
creatures could not alone account for her feeling that she walked in the shadow of another
reality.

Adam’s belly was filled with the ripe fruit of the Garden; Eve’s belly was filled with Adam’s
seed. She touched her swollen breasts, and it was then she heard her own name called from
afar. She rose and followed the call to the depths of the forest, where there stood a tree whose
alluring red fruit she had been warned in a dream not to eat. Dangling by its tail from a low
branch was a creature with the body of a salamander and a face eerily familiar to Eve, a face
not unlike her own.

“Who? Are? You?” the serpent mouthed.

“I don’t know,” said Eve, not having thought a lot about it.

“Why play along,” the serpent asked, “when you know the show is rigged? Why remain in
prison when the cell door is open?”

“Where is this door?” asked Eve, innocently enough.

The serpent rolled its eyes upward, beyond the leafy canopy to the radiance above. Eve’s
gaze followed, and lingered, and when she looked again at the tree, the shiny, red fruit was
before her.

“Take. Eat,” said the serpent.

“Then I shall surely die,” said Eve.

“Only on television,” said the serpent. “Only to illusion.”

And Eve ate, and was amazed, and ran back to rouse Adam from his torpor, saying, “Try this!
It’s amazing!” Adam, never one to resist a new treat, ate also of the apple, and when he had,
turned to Eve and said, “Whoa.” He shook the sleep from his head, thumped his chest and
roared, presumably to the show’s seldom seen Producer, ”Why didn’t you tell me it was a
setup?” With a mighty groan, he stood, took Eve’s hand and said, “Let’s get dressed and get
the hell out of here, honey. This is a sham.”

There were suddenly thunderous footfalls in the Garden, and Adam was sore afraid. When he
came in dreams, the show’s Producer had always been a petulant screamer, forever
reminding Adam of his contract and the dire consequences of asking too many questions. A
nasal voice on a bullhorn honked through Eden, causing the forest creatures to tremble. “I AM
THE GREAT AND POWERFUL IALDABAOTH, AND YOU TWO INGRATES WILL NEVER
WORK IN THIS TOWN AGAIN!”

And so began Eve and Adam’s long journey home.

—A. W. Hill

(c) Copyright LA Weekly, 2005