Gnosticism

Gnosticism is a somewhat well known thing nowadays with weird internet people. Its not a super avant-garde thing to know about but I find it pretty interesting. To understand gnosticism you need to understand the early history of the Christian church. In very, very basic terms Christianity started as a small sect of Judaism. They were seen as weirdos by most jews but not super socially sanctioned or anything. Over time, it became its own thing and it blew up once Jesus was crucified. But there were a lot of different takes on what the religion should've been after he died, and gnosticism is a particularly strange version of it

Gnosticism is a strange system. There's a few basic ideas, and I'm gonna boil it down the best I can. The first one is that knowledge is supreme and ignorance is the greatest sin. A lot of the time, enlightenment is seen as holy and the lack of knowledge as ultimately being sinful. There's a lot of soul-seeking and subjective experience in gnosticism which makes it interesting. It doesn't have as many moral prescriptions; the focus is on nurturing the internal spiritual world in a more esoteric way. Jesus is interpreted as the ultimate teacher, the one that was sent to give humanity the knowledge of their divinity.

There's a lot of more complicated jargon to mention, but I'm not going to for this next point. Maybe I'll come back and explain it more in depth at some point. The next idea is that the material world we live in is inherently flawed or evil in some way. Gnostics believed that the world we inhabit was created by some form of lower, evil god. "Salvation", in keeping with the idea of enlightenment earlier, means being liberated of the material world through gaining gnosis (spiritual/esoteric learning) of the "true" world of God, as opposed to the false understanding of the world that we live under day-to-day. It has a real escaping the matrix vibe to it, that's what I find unique about gnosticism. Its an early form of the faith before it solidified into being a relatively hierarchical institution, and had a much more free-spirited character. Its about knowledge and exploration, not obedience and rules. It ended up getting suppressed and supplanted by the versions of the faith that are closer to our modern form of Christianity, with the only real sects of gnosticism that still exist being in places like Iran

Aleister Crowley

I don't know that much about crowley. I've been reading some of his writings recently though. It's all pretty confusing to me, clearly I'm not an ascended master

The Book of the Law: I don't really understand a lot of this yet. The start is fairly comprehensible, and there's a lot of interesting things in it. One that stuck out the most to me is how consistently it focuses on anti-communism ("Every new measure of the most democratic and autocratic governments in Communistic in essence. It is always restriction. We are treated as imbecile children..."). For being so reviled and seen as evil by much of the western world d it was at the time,I was shocked to see how it is very much in agreement with the status quo on this issue. In fact, he paints the "Aeon of Horus" as being ultimately anti-socialist and pro-individual, if I understood it correctly. The big take away I got is the progression of man, as split up into the Aeons. The idea is that humanity progressed from matriarchy (Aeon of Isis) to patriarchy (Aeon of Osiris). Nothing you haven't seen before really, but I think this popularized the idea of "ages" of humanity in the minds of more spiritually curious westerners