The Perennial Philosophy and Syndesiophilia in Christian Alchemy
In which we find little to commend in a median, conservative interpretation of faith traditions by a modern Gnostic lesson, and coin the term syndesiophilia.
There are many differences between the teachings of the world’s belief traditions. For example, is there no god, one god or many gods? What rites and rituals must one perform, at what times, where, and in what manner? Are people basically good, bad, or morally ambiguous? Why is there suffering in the world, and what is its meaning? How is the world to be understood cosmologically, what is the place of humans within it, and what is our fundamental purpose? There is enough conflict within answers to these questions alone to make constructing a single, unifying interpretation difficult by any standard. And yet, it is a tempting prospect that some claim to have solved. The ‘perennial philosophy’ is one such solution.
The perennial philosophy refers to the idea that all true spiritual wisdom comes from the same single source and that this source has been interpreted differently by all the world’s significant faith traditions. It is a universalist impulse that retains the colouration of the European Renaissance in which it was developed. For those who saw it as hubris to discard the ancient traditions of cultures that were not their own, the diversity and disagreement of heterogenous spirituality presents a problem. A solution was to seek a common root, casting disagreement as surface-level and parochial.
Of course, the simplest way to make the landscape of belief more coherent is to adhere to one tradition and label all others as ‘false teachings’ — that is, to maintain an exclusive orthodoxy. These false teachings may be the corrupted inklings of the real truth or complete fabrications, perhaps created intentionally by supernatural evils.
In Christianity, a provocative problem exists in understanding what happens to those who were not exposed to the ‘good news’ of Jesus Christ and, thus, had no opportunity to become Christians and partake of the salvation offered to believers. This is also known as the question of ‘the fate of the unlearned’. By popular account, the ritual of ‘salvation’ begins by first hearing these teachings and then making the choice to accept or reject, with inaction being a de facto rejection. For example, the International Children’s Bible includes in its prefatory pages an unambiguous challenge to the young reader, asking for nothing less than a signed agreement to “accept Him [Jesus] and try to follow Him my whole life”:
Everyone who has heard or reads the Gospel must either: accept Jesus and receive His power, or leave Him behind.[1]
This is an individual, personal salvation, but one must first be exposed to the teachings. The publisher of the above ‘international’ Bible edition is American, and no American Christian organisation could have failed to be influenced by the late Evangelical preacher Billy Graham. He was famous for forcefully prompting his listeners to make such a choice. He did this in many sermons and writings, and it was central to his evangelism. It is telling that he named his magazine, founded in 1960, simply Decision. Here is a passage from a sermon, typical of his persuasive style:
There’s either God, your spiritual father, the true and the living God, Christ. Or, there is the devil. And then you have to choose not only between two ways of life and two masters and two fathers, but you have to choose between two destinies: heaven or hell. …
Yes, and this choice is very urgent. To delay makes the right decision harder. Indecision is itself a choice. Not to decide is to decide not to. Choose now![2]
While I have focused on the Christian example here, the same question can be raised by any other faith that insists on a “narrow … way” to salvation[3]. Christians following this theology must ask, what happens to the person who, through no fault of their own, did not encounter these teachings and pointedly demanded to choose?
In an article on this subject, the popular Evangelical Christian publisher Focus on the Family insists culpability does not depend on an encounter with teachings.[4] Using a book entitled Faith Comes by Hearing: A Response to Inclusivism, they quote:
Scripture teaches that our condemnation is based on the fact that we are sinners, not because at some point in time we rejected the gospel… Furthermore, God’s wrath is revealed against everyone who suppresses his truth revealed through creation… Strictly speaking, the Bible denies that there are persons who have never heard of God.[5]
This appears to conflict with the traditional goal of conversion and proselytisation, or at least to make it of much less importance. The modern Christian movement of Evangelicalism is explicit about the priority of spreading their theology — to ‘evangelise’ is to spread the message of the Christian faith, taken from ‘angel’ in Latin, meaning ‘messenger’. Jesus said, “no man cometh unto the Father, but by me”[6] and instructed his followers, “Go ye into all the world, and preach the gospel to every creature.”[7] These biblical verses, among others, have supported the position that unless one knows about Jesus Christ, there is no way to the salvation he offers.
The view that knowledge is the essential component of salvation is the most prominent aspect of Gnosticism — gnosis is Greek for knowledge. It was a Christian sect of the early church, existing sometime in 100–350 AD, and possibly even pre-existing Christianity in a proto-Christian form. Biblical scholar Bart D. Ehrman[8] writes that, for the Gnostic, the world is corrupted and “deliverance from the material world can happen only when we learn the secret knowledge that can bring salvation. Some of these texts … indicate that Jesus is the one who brings this knowledge. …It is knowledge of ourselves.”[9]
In principle, gnosis is derived from the self through reflection and meditation, in contrast with scriptural learning and received wisdom, since, for the Gnostic, humanity partakes directly of the divine, if in a limited way. In practice, however, one must be initiated into a Gnostic mystery teaching, as we shall see shortly. Gnosticism virtually died out (or, rather, was stamped out) with the onset of Christian orthodoxy of the late fourth century as the canonical New Testament books were decided upon. Remnants of these ideas were, however, an influence on medieval Hermeticism and its links to alchemy, but it was not until the discovery of the so-called ‘Gnostic Gospels’, the Nag Hammadi, in Egypt in 1945 that significant primary documents from the Gnostics themselves were known. Before this time, Gnosticism was mainly known through the denunciations of their opponents, from what was to become the orthodox strain of early Christianity.
It is hard to overstate the impact of the discovery of these documents, as they offered a fresh insight into the plurality of early Christian theology and, for some, supported modern challenges as to what is the correct Christian interpretation of the Bible, and indeed of the choice of scripture considered canon itself. Today, we have a variety of quasi-Christian groups or heretical interpretations, such as A Course in Miracles, that clearly take inspiration from the Gnostic teachings. We also see an influence on those adopting the lineage of the mystery schools and secret and secretive societies that practice rituals and ceremonial magic, such as those developed by alchemists and the Freemasons.
A core belief of esoteric scholars of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century was universalism, apparent in the works of Manly P. Hall (Philosophical Research Society, f. 1934), Helena “Madame” Blavatsky (Theosophical Society, f. 1875), and Rudolf Steiner (Anthroposophical Society, f. 1913, a German break-away of the American Theosophical Society). They based their work on a syncretic study of world religions and mystery cults, aiming to reconstruct the common thread of an ancient secret mysticism that informed all others. Like the late nineteenth-century anthropologists who developed comparative mythology, their work assumed and looked for a proto-mythology, a once common single mythology, or at least some universally shared source. For example, Hall claimed that “[the secret] doctrine [concerning the inner mysteries of life] has been preserved in toto among a small band of initiated minds since the beginning of the world.”[10]
Today, some modern seekers continue the work of these occultists, and it is to an example of these teachings that we now turn our attention, a lesson entitled “Mercury, Hermes”[11] from the Alchemy Course of Glorian Publishing. This institution promotes the teachings of Samael Aun Weor (1917–1977), a Colombian esotericist who taught what he called ‘Universal Gnosticism’. The author of this lesson is anonymous, attributed only as “a Gnostic Instructor”. This is very much in keeping with the secretive practices that have kept such knowledge occult (literally, hidden). If these claims are to be believed, some writers, such as Hall, warn us that they were “secret societies, binding their initiates to inviolable secrecy, and avenging with death the betrayal of their sacred trusts.”[12] One wonders why the wisdom of these mysteries is now revealed in courses such as this and how it has managed to remain hidden throughout the centuries.
This lecture attempts a synthesis of various religious concepts: Christian New Testament theology, the mythology of the Greek god Hermes and later mystical Hermeticism, Jewish mystical Kabbalah, and references to some Eastern teachings such as pertaining to Vedic (Indian) chakras. These are combined under the mission of ‘alchemy’ in the Hermetic tradition — that is, spiritual alchemy, where the alchemical transmutation occurs within the practitioner on a metaphysical level rather than as a crude material process and a discredited science, the progenitor of chemistry. The lecture is a primer on the ethical life and practices of the Gnostic, with some hints as to what this should look like and attempts to provide scriptural legitimacy to this aim with a variety of expansive symbolic links to various spiritual traditions.
The Gnostic Instructor puts it this way: “Alchemy is about transforming ourselves. That is the real secret of Alchemy.” In what way may the self be transformed? Here, much is borrowed from the eminent psychologist C. G. Jung, who included alchemy as perhaps primary among his many mystical interests. An influential collection of his lectures can be found in his Psychology and Alchemy. Jung, too, studied Gnosticism and even purchased part of the Nag Hammadi for his own library. This portion is popularly known as the Jung Codex.
Jung’s theories propose a background realm of shared human consciousness that he called the collective unconscious. While primarily a psychological concept, it has a mystical aspect in that Jung saw it as connecting individual human consciousnesses in a way that was more than just figurative. In his theory of the psyche, archetypes reside in the collective unconscious and are expressed in the personal subconscious as complexes. A detailed review is beyond the scope of this essay, but it is worth noting that he saw these archetypes in a way reminiscent of a pantheon of gods.[13] Because of this, subsequent mystical writers have found significant latitude in using his work to connect the myths of antiquity to our modern understanding of the mind and to reinterpret mythology as personal psychology. We see that in the lesson of the Gnostic Instructor with the emphasis on Hermes.
Common to mystics is a foregrounding of the interpretation of symbols and a rejection of obvious, surface-level literalism. To a degree, this echoes the Platonic Idealism and the theory of Forms, where symbols are representations of a spiritual reality and, so, ways to access them. Symbols are always thought to contain secret teachings if only one knows how to interpret them. A. E. Waite, creator of the Rider-Waite-Smith tarot deck (the world’s most popular tarot variant), wrote in his companion to that deck that “symbolism is the most catholic [universal] expression in concealment of things that are most profound in the Sanctuary…”.[14] Hall, in his magnum opus work, The Secret Teachings of All Ages, writes:
By symbols men have ever sought to communicate to each other those thoughts which transcend the limitations of language. Rejecting man-conceived dialects as inadequate and unworthy to perpetuate divine ideas, the Mysteries thus chose symbolism as a far more ingenious and ideal method of preserving their transcendental knowledge. …
Their knowledge of chemistry and mathematics they hid within mythologies which the ignorant would perpetuate…[15]
The Glorian lecture makes various tenuous claims of the relationship between ancient symbols. For example, that Greek Herma stones, related to Hermes, is what is meant by Jacob’s stone pillow in the biblical story of the dream of the ladder to heaven (Genesis 28), and of how this links with Masonic pillars, which connect to a Tibetan Buddhist physiological understanding of the spine, connecting with the erect penis, again, as seen on Herma stones. It is heavily implied that this interpretation suggests knowledge—in fact, the Truth—shared among the Greeks, Egyptians, Tibetans, and others. It is here we find our perennialism. Recall Hall’s claim that there is an unbroken lineage of knowledge protected by secret societies. However, The Gnostic Instructor is much less cautious in speculating on potential links such as the above than more serious scholars like Hall. We may coin a neologism to capture their attitude: syndesiophilia — the love of connection, from the Greek for connection, syndesi, and philia, in the common suffix as used in English to denote love or attraction, especially to an object or practice. I intend this to capture not only a love of connection but an excessive focus on connective speculation.
Undoubtedly, no figure looms larger in the Western mind of the last two millennia than Jesus of Nazareth, the itinerant apocalyptic Jewish preacher of the late Second Temple period whose followers founded Christianity from his teachings. The significant details of his life story have been proposed by some to contain curious similarities to that of older ‘pagan’ gods, such as Mithras (Iranian, adopted by Romans), Osirus (Egyptian), Dionysus and Attis (Greek), as well as the historical Greek philosopher and mystic Apollonius of Tyana.[16] These coincidences seem to point to a prolific borrowing in the mythology of the ancient Near East, but syndesiophiliacs are prone to view the situation as one of intentional, secret relationships across cultures.
Central to the argument of the lesson, though only somewhat loosely implied, is that the figure of Jesus Christ is a symbolic continuation of the Greek god Hermes and that, therefore, Christianity continues the Hermetic mystery cult tradition, with its exoteric (outwardly visible) side as traditional Christianity as we know it, and its truer esoteric and mystical side hidden but revealed through the study of alchemy. It is repeatedly emphasised that these figures, like all others in art and scripture, should be taken symbolically and not literally.
However, the Hermetic tradition that feeds into medieval alchemy has not as much as might appear to do with ancient Greek mythology and more with early first millennium Egyptian Hermeticism, where the Greek Hermes was conflated with the Egyptian god Thoth. (This name has been preferred by some wishing to emphasise Egyptian mysticism, such as Aleister Crowley in his Thoth Tarot, for example.) In the second century AD or earlier, an esoteric strain of Gnosticism existed in Alexandria, Egypt, following the teachings of Hermes Trismegistus, or Hermes ‘thrice greatest’.[17] The major work attributed to this figure is the Corpus Hermeticum, written by unknown adepts in the second or third century AD. It was to be a very influential work on medieval esotericism.
A particular claim stands out of the Gnostic Instructor’s lesson, an odd one at that. The Instructor links the Hebrew word for oil שמן (Latinised to shemen) with the English word ‘semen’. We read:
This Hebrew word is translated as “oil,” and is a symbol of how the initiates retain and transform their sexual energy, by “anointing their stone.” That is, the sexual matter is not expelled from the body, but is transformed inside… Oil in the Bible represents transmuted sexual energy. The anointing of oil is a symbol of transmutation.[18]
There is, in fact, no relationship between these words other than a superficial phonetic similarity. The English word ‘semen’ comes from the Latin for ‘seed’ and is distinct in its history from Semitic languages like Hebrew. Unfounded and dubious claims such as this are not uncommon throughout the lesson. We also read a questionable connection between the Jewish menorah, a seven-branched candle holder: “What is a menorah? It is a series of seven pipes, the pan-pipes that Hermes invented.”[19] There could be some shared significance through the number seven, as it was used widely in antiquity to symbolise the divine, but any direct relationship is entirely unclear and unestablished in the literature.
Instead of providing credible reasoning and sources, the Gnostic Instructor seems content to speculate on the ancient sources to suit their own decidedly modern interpretation. The Christian book Misreading Scripture with Western Eyes[20] deals with this subject, making a case for a historical reading of biblical scripture rather than applying modern concepts and interpretive techniques to extract teachings (though not to dismiss scriptural authority — the authors are pious Christians). Their motivating question is: what went without being said? Ancient art and texts, as with modern instances, take for granted an enormous amount of knowledge assumed by its intended audience and known to those contemporary with the work itself.
In Disney’s 1989 film The Little Mermaid, the titular mermaid Ariel asks her seagull friend Scuttle to explain the name and purpose of a metal fork found on the sea floor. After a thoughtful pause, he confidently proclaims it is a ‘dinglehopper’, saying that “humans use these little babies to straighten their hair out.”[21] Ariel takes his word for it, considering him wise, and later embarrasses herself when in human form at a dinner by combing her hair with one. What went without being said for the makers of the fork is that it was cutlery.
The authors of Misreading Scripture explain that “we instinctively fill in the gap [of our scriptural understanding] with a piece of our own culture — usually a piece that goes without being said.”[22] The Gnostic Instructor does this with their assumption of a shared root between shemen and semen. Using a promiscuous ecumenical syndesiophilia, they are convinced they have extracted the true hidden meaning, but this is a mistake.
Beyond an interesting summary of various ancient mystical traditions and the associated mythology, though it is misleading and flawed, the wisdom that the Instructor offers is quite conventional — hardly befitting the claim of secret teachings. The following passage is representative:
The abysses are our mind, our animalism, pride, lust, envy, greed, gluttony, fear, arrogance, anger, hate, jealousy. …None of that can go to heaven. It has to be separated; it has to be purged and purified. That is what Alchemy means: to transform lead into gold. The lead is our ego. Lead is our desire. It is a base, heavy, impure metal that sinks into hell.[23]
The advice is to avoid immorality and vice and to control and redirect desires and passions, especially of the sexual variety. These are not secret teachings by any means. Elsewhere, the Gnostic Instructor categorises traditional religion as “a lunar path”, inferior to “the new solar current [and] the new Christic current.”[24] The solar path is that of “awakened consciousness”, whereas lunar, traditional religion is implied to be asleep and automatic. The Instructor says that awakened ones practice “eliminating ego, giving birth to virtue, and serving others.”[25] It is unclear how this differs from the highest virtues of traditional religions, which are largely ordinary human virtues. For example, in the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus tells his disciples, “If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me.”[26]
Spiritual hierarchy is a core feature of Gnosticism, as well as the suggestion that not everyone is fit to receive the real wisdom and the truth. All secret and secretive societies and mystery cults maintain this self-congratulatory elitism. The Gnostic Instructor attempts to mitigate the force of this by referring to the lunar path as “not bad.”[27] Still, it is apparent that those on it are not awakened and, likely, will not receive true salvation, which for the Gnostic means liberation from the material world. According to Ehrman, this attitude is consistent with even the earliest Gnostics in the first centuries after Christ: “The Gnostics virtually fetishized this notion of an elite, a group of people in the know, who recognized the true nature of the church’s procession of faith, of its Scriptures, of its sacraments.”[28]
Perhaps one teaching that may, at first glance, appear uncommon is the implication that abstaining from sex, either with a partner or in masturbation, conserves energy. We read earlier that “initiates retain and transform their sexual energy” and that by doing this “sexual matter is not expelled from the body, but is transformed inside”.[29] Though sexual abstinence is by no means historically uncommon in religious practices, today, it is often talked about for men under the term ‘semen retention’, emphasising the symbolic storing of male power.
The moral dimension of this practice shows its real reason for men today; it is conflated with recovery from addiction to pornography and is related to the ‘no fap’ men’s betterment movement (‘fap’ being an onomatopoeic term for masturbation common in online speech). By adherents, masturbation is considered a weakness, and ejecting the ‘vital’ fluid of semen, one symbolically loses one’s male virile power. Books such as Semen Retention Miracle by Joseph Peterson promote this practice’s health benefits, confidently crossing the line from symbolic to literal. Peterson purports that excessive sperm production caused by frequent ejaculation leads to vitamin deficiency and low levels of testosterone, as well as wasting time and energy that can be redirected to more worthy pursuits. Indeed, Semen Retention Miracle cites a Glorian Publishing article in its bibliography on Veerya (Vīrya), referencing a Hindu practice of sexual abstinence.[30]
A comment from Alan Watts is relevant on the practices of sexual control related in the Indian roots of chakras, tantric yoga, and the kundalini. Watts bears much responsibility for popularising such teachings in the West and yet remains one of the most subtle interpreters:
The practice of sexual yoga employs a male and a female partner [in which they] arouse the sexual force. The theory is that instead of dissipating this energy in the ordinary way — through orgasm — they send it up the spinal tree, back into the brain. Do not take this literally. It is symbolism. To take this symbolism literally would be to turn it into a superstition. … All of these images are ways of talking about our inner anatomy, our psychic anatomy. [Emphasis added.] [31]
There are, in fact, many interesting similarities between the world’s ancient traditions that beg for explanation, making this lesson from Glorian Publishing all the more disappointing. Excavating the past and attempting to reassemble fragmentary ruins is a task that requires careful scholarship. The Gnostic Instructor is right to point out that many Jewish and Christian Bible texts contain symbolism and can be read allegorically. Only the most fundamentalist scripturalists believe there was a first man named Adam from whom the first woman named Eve was created from his rib. For a credible but no less controversial interpretation of the biblical creation story as an allegory for the foundation of the early Jewish temple, we can read The Lost World of Genesis One.[32] The author, a Bible-believing Christian, attempts to make sense of the Book of Genesis without taking it literally. In the case of the Glorian lesson, however, the Instructor espouses the particular heretical theological claim that “the forces of divinity create the perfect Adam, which is a self-realized being, which is another god.”[33] It is truly impossible to make such a claim consistent with any form of mainstream Christianity. Even Gnosticism allows only for a “spark of the divine”[34] within humanity. We may now consider this a kind of revisionist or post-Christian teaching.
Unfortunately, works such as this lesson from Glorian Publishing do more to confuse and obscure than to illuminate. The strategy seems to be to overwhelm the student with a torrent of facts and a loose but complex web of connections, impressive in scope but inscrutable as a whole. It may be perfectly adequate as a vehicle for their spiritual teachings, but to the serious mystical seeker, they gamble their credibility. This is, of course, by no means uncommon. Some examples of more reliable work can be found in the aforementioned writings of Manly P. Hall and also more recent scholars such as John Michael Greer and Gary Lachman. These authors’ work is accessible and clear, and yet, admirably, they do not betray their scholarship in the name of their spiritual beliefs and goals.
The quality of discourse in the Glorian lesson is reminiscent of the discredited and debunked film Zeitgeist: The Movie,and we may even consider the former to be an ancestor of the latter. Zeitgeist, too, proposes a secret and revisionist reading of the story of Jesus, with a stronger emphasis on the zodiac. The filmmaker claims that Jesus was a symbolic sun god linked with the Egyptian Horus. An earlier cut of the movie, which has been edited to remove this claim,[35] makes a very similar error to the Gnostic Instructor in relating the English word ‘sun’ with ‘son’, as in Jesus as the Son of God, an error of basic etymology.
Zeitgeist: The Movie ultimately concludes that religion is an evil thought-control mechanism used by a secret lineage of masters to control the world, responsible for the 9/11 World Trade Center attacks, among other events. The difference between those who consider themselves the heirs of ancient secret mysteries is in the moral tone of their vision and the suspicion or acceptance of elitism. To modern Gnostics, who have reinvented this ancient religion, the secret society of initiates are the ‘good guys’. But they share a propensity for incautious symbolic thinking and a belief in hidden secrets that are the basis for conspiracy thinking. It is here that there is the potential for the danger of becoming lost in a speculative house of cards that justifies paranoia.
A truly gnostic philosophical approach may be a valuable counterbalance to creeping syndesiophilia, especially as applied to their own teachings — a love of knowledge and a belief that it is the key to freedom. One must balance the exoteric — including historical analysis and engagement with the best contemporary scholarship — with the esoteric rather than haphazardly inventing unfounded connections.
[1] Holy Bible: International Children’s Bible, New Century Version. Word Publishing, 1991, p. ix.
[2] “Making Choices — A Powerful Billy Graham Sermon.” Bibilium.Com, 2 Mar. 2021, bibilium.com/making-choices-billy-graham-sermon/.
[3] King James Bible, Matthew 7:14.
[4] Velarde, Robert. “What about Those Who Have Never Heard?” Focus on the Family, 1 Jan. 2009, www.focusonthefamily.com/faith/what-about-those-who-have-never-heard/.
[5] Morgan, Christopher W., and Robert A. Peterson. Faith Comes by Hearing: A Response to Inclusivism. IVP Academic, 2008, p. 241.
[6] King James Bible, John 14:6.
[7] King James Bible, Mark 16:15.
[8] It should be noted that Ehrman is a ‘lapsed’ Christian and is a controversial scholar for many Christian believers, though his scholarship is still respected by most.
[9] Ehrman, Bart D. Lost Christianities: The Battles for Scripture and the Faiths We Never Knew. Oxford University Press, 2002, p. 114.
[10] Hall, Manly P. 1928. The Secret Teachings of All Ages. TarcherPerigee, 2003, p. 38.
[11] Gnostic Instructor. “Mercury, Hermes — Alchemy, a Free Course.” Glorian, Glorian Publishing, https://glorian.org/learn/courses-and-lectures/alchemy/mercury-hermes. Accessed 30 Sept. 2023.
[12] Hall, p. 37.
[13] See ‘Chapter 5: Jung and Psychological Mysticism’ from my book A Critical Introduction to Tarot: Examining the Nature of a Belief in Tarot, Iff Books, 2023, Simon Kenny.
[14] Waite, Arthur Edward. 1910. The Pictorial Key to the Tarot. Rider, 2021, pp. xi–xii.
[15] Hall, p. 37.
[16] Lachman, Gary. The Secret Teachers of the Western World. TarcherPerigee, 2015, p. 102.
[17] Lachman, p. 131.
[18] Gnostic Instructor, op. cit.
[19] Ibid.
[20] Richards, E. Randolph, and Brandon J. O’Brien. Misreading Scripture with Western Eyes: Removing Cultural Blinders to Better Understand the Bible. IVP Books, 2012.
[21] The Little Mermaid. Directed by Ron Clements and John Musker, Walt Disney Pictures, 1989.
[22] Richards, pp. 12–13.
[23] Gnostic Instructor, op. cit.
[24] Ibid.
[25] Ibid.
[26] King James Bible. Matthew 16:24.
[27] Gnostic Instructor, op. cit.
[28] Ehrman, pp. 132–3.
[29] Gnostic Instructor, op. cit.
[30] Sivananda. “Ayurveda: Veerya, the Vital Fluid.” Glorian, Glorian Publishing, https://glorian.org/learn/scriptures/hindu/ayurveda-virya-the-vital-fluid. Accessed 11 Jan. 2024.
[31] Watts, Alan. 1996. “Buddhism: The Religion of No-Religion.” Tuttle Publishing, 1999, p. 89.
[32] Walton, John H. The Lost World of Genesis One: Ancient Cosmology and the Origins Debate. IVP Academic, 2009.
[33] Gnostic Instructor, op. cit.
[34] Ehrman, p. 124.
[35] https://skepticproject.com/articles/zeitgeist/part-one/#interesting_findings
Note: a version of this essay appeared on an ill-fated Substack.
Simon Kenny is an independent researcher and writer based in Ireland. His work combines probing questions with technical thinking to explore the landscape of belief.
My book, A Critical Introduction to Tarot, explores what tarot means today. It is available in paperback and ebook: https://www.collectiveinkbooks.com/iff-books/our-books/critical-introduction-tarot
