Overview

"""Lash is capable of explaining the mind-bending concepts of Gnosticism and pagan mystery cults with bracing clarity and startling insight. . . . [His] arguments are often lively and entertaining.""-Los Angeles Times In Not in His Image John Lamb Lash explains how a little-known messianic sect propelled itself into a dominant world power, systematically wiping out the great Gnostic spiritual teachers, the Druid priests, and the shamanistic healers of Europe and North Africa. Early Christians burned libraries and destroyed temples in an attempt to silence the ancient truth-tellers and keep their own secrets. But as Lash reveals the truth cannot be hidden or destroyed. Not in His Image delves deeply into the shadows of ancient Gnostic writings to reconstruct the story early Christians tried to scrub from the pages of history, exploring the richness of the ancient European Pagan spirituality-the Pagan Mysteries, the Great Goddess, Gnosis, the myths of Sophia and Gaia. Long before the birth of Christianity, monotheism was an anomaly; Europe and the Near East flourished under the divine guidance of Sophia, the ancient goddess of wisdom. The Earth was the embodiment of Sophia and thus sacred to the people who sought fulfillment in her presence. This ancient philosophy was threatening to the emerging salvation-based creed of Christianity that was based on patriarchal dominion over the Earth and lauded personal suffering as a path to the afterlife. As Derrick Jensen points out in the afterword, in Lash's hands Jesus Christ emerges as the agent provocateur of the ruling classes. ""Sometimes a book changes the world. Not in His Image is such a book. It is clear, stimulating, well-researched, and sure to outrage the experts. . . . Get it. Improve not just your own life, but civilization's chances for survival.""-Roger Payne, author of Among Whales"

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9781931498920

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John Lash's heretical book is a precious act of spiritual disobedience that seeks to save the world from Salvationism. Lash opens new ground between myth and ecology, and helps one feel what the planet feels. He proposes direct knowing and moving beyond belief, and advocates animism as a proposition to test. He leaves the future open and in need of human imagination. Humanity is implicated in the future of the living planet, but Lash exercises caution when making suppositions about our role as a species. This book is learned, courageous, and full of insights. Some may find it challenging and even shocking, but it is an important read for those interested in life on earth. It is made for readers to chew on, rather than believe. <br><br>--Jeremy Narby, anthropologist, author of The Cosmic Serpent, DNA and the Origins of Knowledge and Intelligence in Nature: An Inquiry into Knowledge

Los Angeles Times Sunday Book Review- Gnosticism is a label applied to a collection of religious ideas that has long exerted a certain appeal to public intellectuals and controversialists, ranging from the theologian Marcion in the 2nd century AD to literary critic Harold Bloom in our time. What attracts them, I suppose, is the conviction that the highest truths are available only to a small circle of initiates -- the Greek term gnostokoi can be translated as those who understand divine matters, knowing what the gods know. The latest to unfurl the banner of Gnosticism is John Lamb Lash, who describes the Gnostics of the ancient world as the elite of Pagan intellectuals and declares that their writings are the explosive charge that can blow the institution of the Faith off its foundations, for good and all. By the Faith, he means the Judeo-Christian-Islamic tradition in its entirety, and he intends to do nothing less than convert his readers into latter-day Gnostics. Lash, whose publisher describes him as an exponent of the practice of mythology, rejects much of the contemporary scholarship on Gnosticism. For example, he dismisses the work of Princeton historian Elaine Pagels, author of The Gnostic Gospels, because she places the texts discovered at the Egyptian archeological site of Nag Hammadi within the context of early Christianity. Such an approach, he insists, has hampered understanding of who the Gnostics were, and why they protest so vehemently against the rise of Christianity. Lash seeks to rescue Gnosticism from the dustbin of Christian history and restore it to its rightful place amid the splendors of pagan antiquity. To signal his admiration for the fecund religious imagination of paganism, he capitalizes the word Pagan as if it were a single faith rather than a phantasmagorical assortment of beliefs and practices. But he does point out that Gnosticism itself shouldn't be described as a religion or even a sect, if only because gnostokos was the generic term for any person learned in divine matters. Above all, he insists that Gnosticism represents the path toward spiritual deep ecology, symbolized by today's adherents of the Greek earth goddess Gaia. Not in His Image is perhaps best compared to Robert Graves' The White Goddess, an earlier and only slightly less eccentric effort to find and explain the linkages among the fantastic variety of religious experiences in the ancient world. Like Graves, Lash is a self-invented scholar who has read widely and thought deeply. (He is the author of Quest for the Zodiac, The Hero and The Seeker's Handbook, and the co-founder of metahistory.org with a former wife, Joanna Harcourt-Smith, who lived with Timothy Leary in the 1970s. And he is general executor of the estate of Jack Kerouac's daughter, Jan, to whom he also was once married.) He confidently issues pronouncements about what he calls the wholesale genocide of Pagan culture and prescriptions for the spiritual salvation of the world. Lash offers this work as a corrective to the scholarly specialization that condemns the Gnostics to an obscure and uncertain place on the margins of the history of religion. Along the way, he seeks to repudiate what he sees as the pigheadedness of the academic establishment. Thus, for example, he condemns biblical scholars who do not see the continuities that Lash detects between the early Christians and the religious community at Qumran. He calls them Zaddikites, but they are better known to the lay reader as the custodians of the Dead Sea Scrolls: They fail to realize that the message of love in the charming miracle tales of the New Testament is a sugar coating on the bitter cyanide of Zaddikite ravings. But Lash is not concerned merely with scolding biblical scholars. His goal is to melt down the religious and philosophical ideas of antiquity and recast them as a serviceable faith for our world. In place of the Judeo-Christian-Islamic tradition, which he links to the religious schizophrenia of the ancient Hebrews and which he flatly condemns as annihilation theology, he proposes that we embrace Gnosticism and what he dubs Gaian ethics, which he describes as not a call to faith in God, but faith in the human species. Lash is capable of explaining the mind-bending concepts of Gnosticism and pagan mystery cults with bracing clarity and startling insight. At moments, however, he slips into a kind of New Age rant as baffling as any mystical text. What we seek in 'Gaia theory' is a live imaginal dimension, he writes in one such passage, not a scaffolding of cybernetic general systems cogitation. Or: Gnosis, taken as a path of experimental mysticism, and the Sophianic vision, taken as a guiding narrative for co-evolution, can provide the spiritual dimension for deep ecology independently of the three mainstream religions derived from the Abrahamic tradition. Even he acknowledges that his book can be a long haul and a lot to follow and that his line of reasoning demands exceptional concentration from the likes of us, many of whom cannot stay in the moment for three minutes at a time. Lash's arguments are often lively and entertaining, even when they aren't convincing. When he contends that Celtic civilization spread to the far corners of the ancient world -- An apocryphal legend claims that John the Baptist was a Celt, he writes, and Mary Magdalene was Circassian, half Celt, half Jewish -- he is reduced to citing the film Lawrence of Arabia to support the proposition that Celtic half-breeds survived in the Levant down into the early twentieth century. And when he considers what he calls the sci-fi theology of the ancient Gnostics, he comes uncomfortably close to affirming that the otherworldly Archons of Gnostic myth were authentic extraterrestrials. It is worth noting that the first great UFO wave of the twentieth century occurred in the summer and fall of 1947 when Jean Doresse was in Cairo examining the Nag Hammadi Codices, at the very moment the first Dead Sea Scrolls were found, Lash writes. This was also the year that the CIA was founded, with the dual intention (according to UFO conspiracy buffs) to co-opt alien technology and cut a deal with the aliens, allowing them to experiment covertly on human subjects.... In fact, a CIA agent named Miles Copeland was dispatched to Damascus to examine and photograph some of the first scroll fragments to be unearthed. At one telling moment at the outset of his book, Lash describes how his life was transformed when, in early adolescence, he was reading a copy of Nietzsche's Thus Spake Zarathustra in the back seat of the family car on the way back from an orthodontist's appointment in upstate New York. I swore to finish what Nietzsche had begun, he declares. I vowed to think through and live out his critique of Christianity to the end. With Not in His Image he keeps that vow. But when Lash invites us to embrace the high strangeness of what he calls the ET/Archon hypothesis with the Gnostic theory of alien intrusion -- the stranger it gets, the more sense it makes, he insists -- he passes wholly through the looking glass. --Jonathan Kirsch

Gnosticism is a label applied to a collection of religious ideas that has long exerted a certain appeal to public intellectuals and controversialists, ranging from the theologian Marcion in the 2nd century AD to literary critic Harold Bloom in our time. What attracts them, I suppose, is the conviction that the highest truths are available only to a small circle of initiates the Greek term gnostokoi can be translated as those who understand divine matters, knowing what the gods know. <br>The latest to unfurl the banner of Gnosticism is John Lamb Lash, who describes the Gnostics of the ancient world as the elite of Pagan intellectuals and declares that their writings are the explosive charge that can blow the institution of the Faith off its foundations, for good and all. By the Faith, he means the Judeo-Christian-Islamic tradition in its entirety, and he intends to do nothing less than convert his readers into latter-day Gnostics. <br>Lash, whose publisher describes him as an exponent of the practice of mythology, rejects much of the contemporary scholarship on Gnosticism. For example, he dismisses the work of Princeton historian Elaine Pagels, author of The Gnostic Gospels, because she places the texts discovered at the Egyptian archeological site of Nag Hammadi within the context of early Christianity. Such an approach, he insists, has hampered understanding of who the Gnostics were, and why they protest so vehemently against the rise of Christianity. <br>Lash seeks to rescue Gnosticism from the dustbin of Christian history and restore it to its rightful place amid the splendors of pagan antiquity. To signal his admiration for the fecund religious imagination ofpaganism, he capitalizes the word Pagan as if it were a single faith rather than a phantasmagorical assortment of beliefs and practices. But he does point out that Gnosticism itself shouldn't be described as a religion or even a sect, if only because gnostokos was the generic term for any person learned in divine matters. Above all, he insists that Gnosticism represents the path toward spiritual deep ecology, symbolized by today's adherents of the Greek earth goddess Gaia. <br> Not in His Image is perhaps best compared to Robert Graves' The White Goddess, an earlier and only slightly less eccentric effort to find and explain the linkages among the fantastic variety of religious experiences in the ancient world. Like Graves, Lash is a self-invented scholar who has read widely and thought deeply. (He is the author of Quest for the Zodiac, The Hero and The Seeker's Handbook, and the co-founder of metahistory.org with a former wife, Joanna Harcourt-Smith, who lived with Timothy Leary in the 1970s. And he is general executor of the estate of Jack Kerouac's daughter, Jan, to whom he also was once married.) He confidently issues pronouncements about what he calls the wholesale genocide of Pagan culture and prescriptions for the spiritual salvation of the world. <br>Lash offers this work as a corrective to the scholarly specialization that condemns the Gnostics to an obscure and uncertain place on the margins of the history of religion. Along the way, he seeks to repudiate what he sees as the pigheadedness of the academic establishment. Thus, for example, he condemns biblical scholars who do not see the continuities that Lash detects between the early Christians and thereligious community at Qumran. He calls them Zaddikites, but they are better known to the lay reader as the custodians of the Dead Sea Scrolls: They fail to realize that the message of love in the charming miracle tales of the New Testament is a sugar coating on the bitter cyanide of Zaddikite ravings. <br>But Lash is not concerned merely with scolding biblical scholars. His goal is to melt down the religious and philosophical ideas of antiquity and recast them as a serviceable faith for our world. In place of the Judeo-Christian-Islamic tradition, which he links to the religious schizophrenia of the ancient Hebrews and which he flatly condemns as annihilation theology, he proposes that we embrace Gnosticism and what he dubs Gaian ethics, which he describes as not a call to faith in God, but faith in the human species. <br>Lash is capable of explaining the mind-bending concepts of Gnosticism and pagan mystery cults with bracing clarity and startling insight. At moments, however, he slips into a kind of New Age rant as baffling as any mystical text. What we seek in 'Gaia theory' is a live imaginal dimension, he writes in one such passage, not a scaffolding of cybernetic general systems cogitation. Or: Gnosis, taken as a path of experimental mysticism, and the Sophianic vision, taken as a guiding narrative for co-evolution, can provide the spiritual dimension for deep ecology independently of the three mainstream religions derived from the Abrahamic tradition. <br>Even he acknowledges that his book can be a long haul and a lot to follow and that his line of reasoning demands exceptional concentration from the likes of us, many of whom cannot stay in the moment forthree minutes at a time. <br>Lash's arguments are often lively and entertaining, even when they aren't convincing. When he contends that Celtic civilization spread to the far corners of the ancient world An apocryphal legend claims that John the Baptist was a Celt, he writes, and Mary Magdalene was Circassian, half Celt, half Jewish he is reduced to citing the film Lawrence of Arabia to support the proposition that Celtic half-breeds survived in the Levant down into the early twentieth century. <br>And when he considers what he calls the sci-fi theology of the ancient Gnostics, he comes uncomfortably close to affirming that the otherworldly Archons of Gnostic myth were authentic extraterrestrials. <br> It is worth noting that the first great UFO wave of the twentieth century occurred in the summer and fall of 1947 when Jean Doresse was in Cairo examining the Nag Hammadi Codices, at the very moment the first Dead Sea Scrolls were found, Lash writes. This was also the year that the CIA was founded, with the dual intention (according to UFO conspiracy buffs) to co-opt alien technology and cut a deal with the aliens, allowing them to experiment covertly on human subjects.... In fact, a CIA agent named Miles Copeland was dispatched to Damascus to examine and photograph some of the first scroll fragments to be unearthed. <br>At one telling moment at the outset of his book, Lash describes how his life was transformed when, in early adolescence, he was reading a copy of Nietzsche's Thus Spake Zarathustra in the back seat of the family car on the way back from an orthodontist's appointment in upstate New York. I swore to finish what Nietzsche had begun, he declares. I vowed to think through and live out his critique of Christianity to the end. <br>With Not in His Image he keeps that vow. But when Lash invites us to embrace the high strangeness of what he calls the ET/Archon hypothesis with the Gnostic theory of alien intrusion the stranger it gets, the more sense it makes, he insists he passes wholly through the looking glass. <br>-Los Angeles Times Sunday Book Review by Jonathan Kirsch, December 3, 2006

Author Information

"John Lamb Lash is a comparative mythologist known for his ground-breaking work on Gnosticism, the Pagan Mysteries, and shamanism. He is a leading exponent of the power of myth to direct individual experience and drive historical events over the long term. In September 2018, John launched Nemeta.org. Intended primarily as a platform for the restoration of the Humanities, the Sophianic School of Arts and Sciences echoes the sacred calling of the ancient Mysteries: to guide humanity toward excellence in moral and creative expressions. Derrick Jensen is the prize-winning author of A Language Older than Words, The Culture of Make Believe, Listening to the Land, Strangely Like War, Welcome to the Machine, and Walking on Water. He was one of two finalists for the 2003 J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize, which cited The Culture of Make Believe as ""a passionate and provocative meditation on the nexus of racism, genocide, environmental destruction and corporate malfeasance, where civilization meets its discontents."" He writes for The New York Times Magazine, Audubon, and The Sun Magazine among many others.  He is an environmental activist and lives on the coast of northern California."

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