What a great read! Way to keep the reader engaged while building up the basis for a wide-ranging analysis. Hermeticism might be mentioned in this context, as w

What a great read! Way to keep the reader engaged while building up the basis for a wide-ranging analysis. Hermeticism might be mentioned in this context, as well, and it's many offshoots over the centuries. If gnosticism has proved insidiously long-lived, it might be attributed to the close association with early Christianity. More likely it has roots in a much older archetypical dualism in which the material and spiritual were the original duality. One rooted in personal experience of "inside" and "outside" which is, kinda ironically, projected onto the outside world. "If all people have an inside and outside existence, then so does everything else, including Everything." It's pretty trippy thinking. And it follows both Christianity and Judaism down the centuries. First in sects and then heresies and then secret societies. Always initiatory, always exclusive, it's "the occult": that fervent desire in humans for the divine promethean magic. To be as gods. To will into existence that which we desire, without consequence. It persists! It's getting worse! Flat earthers are a THING. In 2022. It kinda makes sense that Gnosticism followed the religious through history. It's more surprising to me that Magic did. I see that as a bigger problem.