Book Note: Practicing Gnosis (eds. April DeConick, Gregory Shaw and John Turner)

I  promised to get some book notes out this week, and lo and behold, it is already Friday and I haven't had a chance to get to my blog until now.

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The big news for me is that the festschrift that we have been putting together for Professor Birger A. Pearson has been published by Brill.  Gregory Shaw, John Turner and I have been gathering contributions and editing this project for two years, and it feels so wonderful to see the book published in honor of such a great scholar in the field of early Christian studies and Gnosticism.

Although I was not a graduate student of Professor Pearson, I have always considered myself his student, so essential has been his research to my own.  When I was new to the field in the late 80s and early 90s, his work on Gnosticism helped to orient me and inspire me, especially his classic pieces on Philo, the Jewish nature of Gnosticism, and its Egyptian roots.  So it is with great pleasure that I joined forces with Greg Shaw and John Turner to honor Professor Pearson.

We choose to create a volume around a specific theme, Gnostic rituals and practices, because there is such a gap in our knowledge when it comes to what the Gnostics were actually doing and why they were doing it.  While the book is not comprehensive - how could it be? - we were able to cover five main areas of practice in the volume: initiatory, recurrent, therapeutic, ecstatic, and philosophic practices.

This is the volume in which I have published my paper on the Ophian Diagram, and I am particularly proud of it because I believe that I have actually solved its mystery.

List of articles:

--> Initiatory Practices

April D. DeConick, The Road for the Souls is through the Planets: The Mysteries of the Ophians Mapped
Roger Beck, Ecstatic Religion in the Roman Cult of Mithras
Bas van Os, Gospel of Philip as Gnostic Initiatory Discourse
Elliot Wolfson, Becoming Invisible: Rending the Veil and the Hermeneutic of Secrecy in the Gospel of Philip
Erin Evans, Ritual in the Second Book of Jeu
Nicola Denzey Lewis, Death on the Nile: Egyptian Codices, Gnosticism, and Early Christian Books of the Dead

Recurrent Pratices

Einar Thomassen, Going to Church with the Valentinians
Madeleine Scopello, Practicing ‘Repentance’ on the Path to Gnosis in Exegesis on the Soul
Edward Butler, Opening the Way of Writing: Semiotic Metaphysics in the Book of Thoth
Fernando Bermejo Rubio, “I Worship and Glorify”: Manichaean Liturgy and Piety in Kellis’ Prayer of the Emanations
Jason BeDuhn, The Manichaean Weekly Confessional Ritual
Jorunn Buckley, Ritual Ingenuity in the Mandaean Scroll of Exalted Kingship

Therapeutic Practices

Naomi Janowitz, Natural, Magical, Scientific or Religious? A Guide to Theories of Healing
Grant Adamson, Astrological Medicine in Gnostic Traditions
Marvin Meyer, The Persistence of Ritual in the Magical Book of Mary and the Angels: P. Heid. Inv. Kopt. 685
Rebecca Lesses, Image and Word: Performative Ritual and Material Culture in the Aramaic Incantation Bowls

Ecstatic Practices

John D. Turner, From Baptismal Vision to Mystical Union with the One: The Case of the Sethian Gnostics
Niclas Förster, Marcosian Rituals for Prophecy and Apolytrosis
James Davila, Ritual Praxis in the Hekhalot Literature

Philosophic Practices

Zeke Mazur, The Platonizing Sethian Gnostic Interpretation of Plato’s Sophist
Michael Williams, Did Plotinus’ “Friends” Still Go to Church? Communal Rituals and Ascent Apocalypses

Kevin Corrigan, The Meaning of “One”: Plurality and Unity in Plotinus and Later Neoplatonism
Gregory Shaw, Theurgy and the Platonist’s Luminous Body