Practicing Gnosis: Ritual, Magic, Theurgy and Liturgy in Nag Hammadi, Manichaean and Other Ancient Literature. Essays in Honor of Birger A. Pearson

Nag Hammadi and Manichaean Studies

by April D. DeConick (Editor), Gregory Shaw (Editor), John D. Turner (Editor)

Ritual, magic, liturgy, and theurgy were central features of Gnosticism, and yet Gnostic practices remain understudied. This anthology is meant to fill in this gap and address more fully what the ancient Gnostics were doing. While previously we have studied the Gnostics as intellectuals in pursuit of metaphysical knowledge, the essays in this book attempt to understand the Gnostics as ecstatics striving after religious experience, as prophets seeking revelation, as mystics questing after the ultimate God, as healers attempting to care for the sick and diseased. These essays demonstrate that the Gnostics were not necessarily trendy intellectuals seeking epistomological certainities. They were after religious experiences that relied on practices. The book is organized comparatively in a history-of-religions approach with sections devoted to Initiatory, Recurrent, Therapeutic, Ecstatic, and Philosophic Practices. This book celebrates the brilliant career of Birger A. Pearson.

Genres: Gnosticism, Religion, Philosophy

584 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2013

About the author

April D. DeConick, Ph.D. (Near Eastern Studies, University of Michigan, 1994), is Isla Carroll and Percy E. Turner Professor of New Testament and Early Christianity and Chair of the Department of Religion at Rice University. She is also Co-Founder and Executive Editor of GNOSIS: Journal of Gnostic Studies published by Brill.

Reviews

[Fred Kohn · Rating 5 out of 5]

As is typical in these collections of essays, I reserve them from the library and then forget which essay I was particularly interested in. If I had to guess, I would say it was probably Erin Evans' essay on the second book of Jeu. But I found all the essays engaging and interesting with the exception of two: Nicola Denzey Lewis' essay on books of the dead and James Davila's essay on Helakhot literature. It's not that these essays were any less interesting than the others; they just happened to deal with subjects that didn’t interest me all that much. Given the wide range of subjects these essays covered it was bound to happen.

The one unifying theme of these essays is that they dealt with religious practices as opposed to beliefs. My interest is more in untangling ancient beliefs, especially cosmological beliefs, so I can’t say that this book especially struck my fancy as much as it might have. But of course you can’t talk about religious practice without talking about belief to some extent.

Like every book in this series, this is a book I would love to have in my library. But like every book in this library, it is prohibitively expensive. Many of these essays would bear rereading, especially the ones that dealt with literature with which I am unfamiliar. I did reread Kevin Korrigan's essay on Plotinus and got a lot out of the rereading. Sadly I have this book only for a couple of weeks on Inter Library Loan so I’m only going to get a chance to reread a couple or so more articles before I have to return it.