HowSpiritualismandTheosophyHaunt （HowSpiritualismandTheosophyHaunt）.pdf

How Spiritualism and Theosophy Haunt Early Christian Studies 1 The Case of Gnosticism Denise Kimber Buell, Williams College Westar Seminar at Annual Meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature, San Diego, CA, 2014 dbuell@williams.edu Do not distribute, reproduce, or cite without author’s permission. “The words Gnosis (gnōsis = Knowledge) and Gnosticism relate to certain sects which, during the first centuries in which Christianity was developing, competed with it upon its own grounds….the memory of the Gnostic sects, after the days when they had been eliminated by orthodox Christianity, did not attract much attention. Thenceforth these heresies were dismissed by historians of the Church as fantastic dreams which a little light had been enough to dispel. It was not until the eighteenth century, that epoch of universal curiosity —an epoch in which, moreover, there were mystics, occultists and hermetists searching for spiritual food in all the most ancient and peculiar places —that the Gnosticism of antiquity began to be thought less unworthy of interest.” 2 Jean Doresse, The Secret Books of the Egyptian Gnostics Writing in the late 1950s, Jean Doresse sets the stage for his readers to understand “Gnosticism” in ancient and modern tho