All science fiction is a metaphor for transcendence. Space travel, time travel, the future, other worlds: these are symbolic, from the reader's point of view, of release from the limitations of present space and time. But "escapism" is only part of the appeal. Let us postulate an evolutionary imperative in the human being that promotes change in consciousness. This impulse unravels the "laws" or assumptions that structure our commonsense, consensual world view. Anything is capable of being set on its head. The law of cause and effect, with its one-way movement in time, is circumvented by travel backward in time. The notion that man is at the apex of the evolutionary hierarchy is subverted by contact with superintelligent extraterrestrials. The four dimensions are stretched by faster-than-light space travel. And the very widespread assumption that consciousness is a by-product of the physical functioning of the nervous system is contradicted by science fiction's own brand of mystical awareness.

God may be beyond the province of scientists, but He or She is fair game for science fiction writers. In quest of the much desired "sense of wonder," they elevate many a story involving environmental, technological, and physical change to the level of metaphysics. Because the questioning of established notions is essential to the speculative imagination, it is natural that the religious views of SF writers should tend to the "heretical."

The gnostic religion, which flourished in the first through third centuries A.D., provides an excellent paradigm for the understanding of the type of religious awareness that much SF favors. The gnostics, regarded as heretics by the faction that became orthodox Christianity, were radical transcendentalists. They believed that man is essentially pure spirit (pneuma), trapped in a cage of flesh. The world cannot be taken at face value: it is one vast snare for the senses, causing man to forget his inner spiritual reality. The being who created it was not God: it was a lower power, an "archon" or demiurge, who masquerades as God to the unsuspecting. This creator is not good but evil, or at least ignorant and self-deluded. Mankind's goal must be to transcend its own nescience through gnosis. Gnostic sects had their own subjective science to accomplish this, involving the development of mental powers to break the tyranny of the archons, and the realization of human pneuma as identical with the divine spirit of God.

The gnostic God is alien, an "other" that has no likeness in the material universe. Its reality as pure Being recalls Hindu and Buddhist notions of the Absolute that underlies and permeates all relative manifestation. But popular acceptance went to the Christian sects that were not as harsh and pessimistic in their indictment of the world. That is the common image of gnosticism: a joyless, anti-life philosophy. Yet it is possible that the gnostics were too optimistic for most people as regards human nature. They held the scary notion that rather than being inherently sinful or fallen, the divine pneumatic essence of man, mired down in the materiality of flesh, has the capability to transcend this tight little island ruled by the demiurge and merge with the true God.

The gnostic, who seeks liberation first and foremost, pays no allegiance to the demiurge. Having created man imprisoned and ignorant, the demiurge tries to make sure he stays that way. To the gnostic who rebels against his ignominious lot, the demiurge is a cosmic Big Brother, always watching malevolently and voyeuristically. As Northrop Frye writes in The Great Code, a commentary on the Bible, "One consequence of having a creation myth, with a fall myth inseparable from it, has been the sense of being objective to God, or more specifically, of being constantly watched and observed, by an all-seeing eye that is always potentially hostile."^l In one of Philip K. Dick's hallucinatory worlds in Eye in the Sky (1957), the hero, trapped in the mind of a religious fanatic, rises into the sky on an umbrella and is pulled up into a version of the geocentric medieval cosmos. There he sees a single, hateful, Cyclopean eye perched in the highest heaven. This God is "a childish nebulous personality that required constant praise-and in the most obvious terms. Quick to anger, (Tetragrammaton) was equally quick to sink into euphoria, was eager and ready to lap up these blatant flatteries."² Such is the way a sternly moralistic, sin-obsessed person might project his idea of divinity: a clear image of the tyrannical gnostic demiurge.

This image is further elaborated in Dick's The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (1964). The demiurge here is an alien creature who has taken over the body of Palmer Eldritch, through whom he distributes a hallucinogenic drug called Chew-Z. The drug taker gains the power to materialize anything he wishes, but loses his soul as it were, for the thing that is Eldritch becomes his God. Images of Eldritch's "stigmata"—his artificial hand, slitted eyes, and steel teeth—start popping up everywhere in the hallucination. In a reversal of Christ's sacrifice, the communicant takes on the god's stigmata and undergoes a spiritual death in order that the god may perpetuate itself. In fact, the effect easily spreads to those who have not taken the drug, throwing into doubt the substantiality of everybody's reality. Is the world as we know it but a hallucination implanted in our minds by an evil aspect of God, a false God, who suffers under his own limitations of fate?

The answer of David Lindsay in A Voyage to Arcturus (1920) is clearly affirmative. Lindsay's demiurge is called Crystalman. He steals the green sparks of vital spiritual fire of Muspel, domain of Surtur, the true God, and "crystallizes" them into living forms. When Lindsay's hero Maskull tours the planet Tormance, he confronts an amazing series. of individuals, each with different sensory organs such as third eyes or tentacles sprouting from the chest-and correspondingly differing philosophies and theologies. The woman Joiwind, a beautiful and unselfish child of nature, identifies the Creator (Crystalman) as God and accepts the state of nature as good; despite her virtue, she has made an intellectual error, as Maskull later realizes. On Tormance, truth and beauty are not the same. Beauty and pleasure constitute the net of Crystalman which ensnares the sparks of Muspellight.

The gnostics repudiated this net of illusion—the kosmos or system—rather than the world per se. As Stephan A. Hoeller describes it:

... the Gnostics did not necessarily reject the actual earth itself, which they recognized as a screen upon which the Demiurge of the mind projects the deceptive system. To the extent that we find a condemnation of the world in Gnostic writings, the term is inevitably kosmos, or this aeon, and never the word ge (earth), which they regarded as neutral if not as outright good.³

The radical gnostic sensibility separates appearance from reality. When the gnostic tries to purify the pneuma of the influence of material existence, he does so out of conviction that this existence has no more reality than a hallucination.

Who is the true God in gnosticism? According to William Irwin Thompson, "Hebrew mythology, cast in the mirror of Gnosticism, comes out reversed: Jahweh is the Devil, and the serpent in the garden is the Savior.”⁴ In A V.oyage to Arcturus, the true God, Surtur, appears under the incarnation of the ugly, unpleasant Krag, considered by most on Tormance as the Devil. But a passion for truth will always be considered evil where the real Devil (Crystalman) masquerades successfully as God. Krag is only appreciated for what he is at the end of the novel. Maskull dies and releases Nightspore, his pneumatic spark, who ascends the tower of Muspel. There he gains a vision of Crystalman as a shadowy body who feeds on Muspel fire, trapping it in life forms that are driven to strive painfully for pleasure. "He comprehended at last how the whole world of will was doomed to feel anguish in order that one Being might feel joy.”⁵ Nightspore realizes that the entire created cosmos is Crystalman's, and Muspel is nowhere else but in himself, in the spark of green Muspellight that is his very being. In a sense Krag has saved him by guiding him; in another way, he has earned his own enlightenment by questing (as Maskull) for truth amidst a bewildering variety of types of error. Jacques LaCarriere makes a relevant comment in The Gnostics:

The soul is not immortal by nature, it can only become so if man feeds and sustains this privileged fire which he carries within him. Otherwise, ineluctably, he will return to nothingness .... Man is called upon, in this struggle against the generalized oppressiveness of the real, to create a soul for himself, or if you prefer, to nourish, fortify, and enrich the luminous spark he carries in his innermost being.⁶

Krag does not fight Nightspore's battle for him. Gnosis is an active process. It is earned, not bestowed. In Elaine Pagel's words, "The gnostic understands Christ's message not as offering a set of answers, but as encouragement to engage in a process of searching."⁷ When Gangnet (Crystalman in disguise) bestows a mystical ecstasy of self-annihilation upon Maskull, it proves to be delusory. The kind of pleasure that seems to promise transcendence of self is the subtlest of Crystalman's deceits. Gnostic transcendence is self-possessed, accept­ing not abnegation before God but rather identification and merging.

In his late novels Valis and The Divine Invasion (both 1981), Dick went beyond portraying the demiurge to envisioning the true God. In Valis, Horselover Fat has a genuine religious experience: he perceives the infinite dimension of space, hears the cosmic hum, and feels the boundless love of the Void. Fat believes that everything, including ourselves, is information in a cosmic brain called VALIS (Vast Active Living Information System). He reads the gnostic gospels, which confirm his sense of an "occluded," blind creator who opposes the rational "true god" VALIS. When he meets VALIS in the form of the divine child Sophia (Wisdom), she reintegrates his shattered psyche and delivers her message that man is god and man is holy. Dick draws explicitly from gnostic myth, in which Sophia is "the name of the feminine principle involved in the manifestation of and life of the cosmos and man. She is the helper and inspirer of all Gnosis."⁸

The Divine Invasion dramatizes the gnostic conception of the dyadic nature of the godhead, consisting of the archetypal male and female. Earth is depicted as the property of Belial, the devil. God, projecting Himself into the world to redeem it, is born as a brain-damaged child, Emmanuel, who must reunite with his primordial female partner Zina in order to gain the power to triumph. Like the gnostic Valentinus, Dick attributes the fall of man to God's fall. Evil has come into the world through a split in the godhead. The transcendent part (Yah) has remained absolute while Emmanuel, Zina, and Belial represent fragmented aspects of deity fallen into the relative world. When Emmanuel takes on the unmerciful, judging personality of the Old Testament God, Zina teaches him to love the world. She imparts to him the tragedy and dignity in the death of a lowly dog and reminds him that he created evil. She lifts Emmanuel's motives beyond the negative one of destruction of his adversary to that of loving mankind. Having become aware of his identity with Zina, he reunites with her and defeats Belial.

Both Dick and Lindsay corroborate the main features of gnostic philosophy: the radical dualism of spirit and matter, the transmundane God, and the creation of the cosmos by lesser powers.⁹ But no discussion of science fiction gnosticism can be complete without reference to Olaf Stapledon's Star Maker (1937), although Stapledon is ordinarily classified as an agnostic. In this work—which is more like a latter-day Divine Comedy than a novel—he describes the process of uniting with an alien God-not the god of love, power, wisdom, law, righteousness, or any of the other abstractions worshipped by humans­but a deity with its own dark, inscrutable intentions. The narrator achieves successively higher levels of consciousness by fusing with minds of beings from other planets. Finally all the minds in the galaxy, then the universe, are united, including the consciousnesses of the stars themselves. Only at that point is cognition of the Star Maker achieved.

The Star Maker has two aspects: the creative and the transcendent. The creator is a finite, evolving spirit, one who must create and destroy the universe many times before he achieves the perfection of the Ultimate Cosmos, a universe much more advanced than our own. He learns from his experiments and goes through an "awakening" process corresponding to that of his creatures. The transcendent aspect of the Star Maker is infinite and eternally perfect. It does not evolve and is not involved in any creative or destructive activity. After the Star Maker is united with the cosmic mind of the Ultimate Cosmos, "the Star Maker was now revealed as more than the creative and therefore finite spirit. He now appeared as the eternal and perfect spirit which comprises all things and all times, and contemplates timelessly the infinitely diverse host which it comprises."¹⁰

Like the gnostics, Stapledon subordinates the finite creative aspect of God to the aspect of pure divine being. He does not call the creator evil, but rather dual-natured: both good and evil emanate from the same source. The narrator realizes that there is an element of inhumanity and even cruelty in the Star Maker, but the proper response for man is nevertheless awe and adoration. As one character puts it, "Oh, Star Maker, even if you destroy me, I must praise you. For if you do so, it must be right."¹¹

Stapledon's holistic gnosticism is a bit more sophisticated than Lindsay's dualism of Surtur versus Crystalman; like Dick's, it resembles the Valentinian system of gnosticism, wherein the origin of darkness and evil is placed within the godhead itself. Valentinian cosmology projects the birth of Ialdabaoth (the evil demiurge) from the fallen Sophia, a member of the Pleroma, which was a hierarchy of divine characteristics constituting the fullness of God's being. As soon as God's nature differentiated and fragmented, it seems, the possibility for duality was created: light and darkness, good and evil, creation and destruction, joy and suffering.¹² Ignorance is not merely the result of immersion in materiality but the first cause of material creation. Materiality is a derivative state of the Absolute. The godhead is impaired, and each individual human enlightenment contributes to the task of reintegrating the godhead. Hans Jonas renders the Valentinian "formula" as follows: "Since through 'Ignorance' came about 'Deficiency' and 'Passion,' therefore the whole system springing from the Ignorance is dissolved by knowledge."¹³ Human gnosis redeems the divine fall into ignorance.

Stapledon holds that the human task of "awakening" helps the deity to evolve; thus each little life has enormous significance. The implication of this is that man is a part of God, and is in essence the same thing as God. Other science fiction cosmologies also recognize this unity. Edgar Allan Poe in Eureka (1848) postulates an original Oneness consisting of a single particle from which the whole material universe was irradiated (clearly, Poe anticipated the Big Bang Theory). The cause of the diffusion of matter is the Divine Will, and the universe is as it were the fragmented mind and body of God, with all beings as "infinite individualizations of God." Ultimately the "Heart Divine" of God is our own; consciousness and the human soul are eternal, and each soul is in a sense its own creator and own God. Poe's identification of God and man is in the gnostic spirit. To quote Elaine Pagels:

The gnostic Valentinus taught that humanity itself manifests the divine life and divine revelation .... he and his followers thought of Anthropos ... as the underlying nature of that collective entity, the archetype, or spiritual essence, of human being. ¹⁴

Anthropos, or humanity, was thus seen as its own creator.

Poe valued the spiritual above the material. He wrote of a visionary, unified, "arabesque" reality beyond the limitations of our time-bound and space-bound perceptions, which have access only to the" grotesque" material reality.¹⁵ Gnosticism also maintains this radical separation of matter and spirit. Dualism may not be as neat and as aesthetically pleasing as the ultimate reducibility of monism, but it reflects the experience of a certain stage in spiritual growth. Gnosticism's emphasis on this stage is a response to an acutely felt human need to dissociate oneself from the world. On one hand we are conditioned from birth to become integrated with society, to feel one with nature, to accept our place in relation to the established order, human and divine. On the other we want to be free of all that, including the conservative voices in our own psyches. Gnosticism offers a way to see things differently from the way everybody else says they are.

In the broad sense, much science fiction may be called gnostic because it so often sounds the theme of the quest for direct experience of reality and for liberation from all constraints, internal or external. G. Van Groningen maintains that gnostics "sought to become free by centering the attention on what man is, how man can gain control ... over his environment. By gnosis, man is able to know and control his existence and free it from slavery. This I maintain, is basically a scientific spirit."¹⁶ Thus gnosticism takes as its starting point man rather than God, and it asserts man's right to take control over the material powers that hold him prisoner. The goals of freedom are deliverance from bondage and ultimately identity with deity. In short, we must become supermen and gods, not merely worship them.

There is a tendency in science fiction to turn supermen into messiahs. The reader is invited to project qualities of goodness upon the superman. This relieves problems of moral ambiguity that might arise due to the possession of powers. It is important to realize that the gnostic aspiration is to become a superman on the level of consciousness. In that light, a work that seems full of moral ambiguities, J. G. Ballard's The Unlimited Dream Company (1979), can best be interpreted. This novel portrays a world transformed by consciousness. The narrator, Blake, crashes a stolen Cessna in Shepperton, a quiet suburban town just outside of London. He dies but is reborn as a spiritual being with godlike powers. A drop of his semen causes jungle plants to grow up through the concrete. Soon a lush tropical environment has been superimposed upon the sedate English town, and the townspeople are changed successively into birds, fish, and deer during Blake's "dreams." Finally, having laughingly abandoned all middle-class values, they find they can fly. In a climactic transformation of the village, Blake empowers them to ascend to the sun where they become bands of light in a great rainbow. This apotheosis is then augmented when Blake gathers all the plant and animal life, and even the dead people in the graveyard, and sends them also to the sun. The final vision is one of the merging of the entire world "into the sea of light that formed the universe."¹⁷ In this communal gnosis, matter is transformed into pure spirit.

Blake's project was to make love to everybody in Shepperton, and he does this at least metaphorically. Sex is here a merging beyond physical limits, like flying without mechanical aid. The airplane, which crashes at the very beginning of the novel, is inadequate for the spiritual flight which is the ultimate goal of Blake's lust.

In a gnostic-style inversion, Blake becomes convinced that vices in this world may well be metaphors for virtues in the next. This principle recalls another Blake proverb: "The road of excess leads to the Palace of Wisdom."¹⁸ The novel's pansexualism and the libertinism of merging (through assimilation of another's body) are thereby justified. Sacred libertinism also accounts for Ballard's obsession, in such works as Crash (1973), with technosexual acts, such as autoeroticism in an automobile, as a means of bridging man's alienation from the machine. Hans Jonas in The Gnostic Religion delineates two kinds of gnostics: the ascetics and the libertines. In the case of the latter, there is "a positive obligation to form every kind of action .... amoralism is the means by which freedom is to be obtained." For "the norms of the non-spiritual realm are not binding on him who is of the spirit."¹⁹

The concept of sin is absent from gnosticism; in its place, as the cause of suffering, is ignorance. The true God is an alien, removed utterly from the creation and not responsible for its flaws. Man is capable of realizing and merging with God's consciousness, as ultimately his spirit is of the same pneumatic essence as God's.

Gnosticism is a corrective for a culture that has become so distracted by the relative that it has forgotten the existence of the Absolute. It is an antidote to any religion that does not proceed hand in hand with science, or to any system that subordinates personal experience to ideals and freedom to convention. According to Elaine Pagels, the gnostics "argued that only one's own experience offers the ultimate criterion of truth, taking precedence over all secondhand testimony and all tradition-even gnostic tradition!”²⁰

Gnosticism is, in Jacques LaCarriere's words, a "mutant thought.”²¹ Similarly, science fiction is a mutant literature. At its best it transmits an experiential synthesis of objective and subjective reality, a sense of linkage between our appetite for knowledge of the universe and our spiritual cravings. The mirror in which it reflects us reveals a third eye sprouted in our foreheads: an opening to the infinite vista of stars and worlds, and to the dazzling darkness of our inner selves.

Notes

1. Northrop Frye, The Great Code: The Bible and Literature (New York: Harcourt, 1982), p. 110.

2. Philip K. Dick, Eye in the Sky (New York: Ace, 1957), p. 105.

3. Stephan A. Hoeller, The Gnostic Jung and the Seven Sermons to the Dead (Wheaton, Ill.: Theosophical Publishing House, 1982), p. 15.

4. William Irwin Thompson, The Time Falling Bodies Take to Light (New

York: St. Martin's, 1981), p. 30.

5. David Lindsay, A Voyage to Arcturus (New York: Ballantine, 1968), pp. 285-86.

6. Jacques LaCarriere, The Gnostics (London: Peter Owen, 1977), pp. 49-50.

7. Elaine Pagels, The Gnostic Gospels (New York: Vintage, 1981), p. 135.

8. Anthropos, or humanity, was thus seen as its own creator. Hoeller, p. 226.

9. See Hans Jonas, The Gnostic Religion, 2nd ed. (Boston: Beacon, 1963), pp. 42-47.

10. Olaf Stapledon, Star Maker, in Last and First Men and Star Maker (New York: Dover, 1968), p. 429.

11. Stapledon, p. 291.

12. See Jonas, pp. 174-205.

13. Jonas, p. 312.

14. Pagels, p. 146.

15. See David Ketterer, The Rationale of Deception in Poe (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1979).

16. G. Van Groningen, First Century Gnosticism: Its Origin and Motifs (Leiden: J. Brill, 1967), p. 49.

17. J. G. Ballard, The Unlimited Dream Company (Great Britain: Triad/Granada, 1981), p. 220.

18. William Blake's affinities with gnosticism have been noted by many critics. See, for example, Leopold Damrosch, Jr., Symbol and Truth in Blake's Myth (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1980).

19. Jonas, pp. 272, 273.

20. Pagels, p. 30.

21. LaCarriere, p. 10 .

Copyright © 2004 by Douglas A. Mackey