Gnostic Materialism

A seeming contradiction in terms, Gnostic Materialism is a rough-hewn ontological system elaborated but thinly by Stimes Addisson in his seminal work, The Railroad of Filaments. It can perhaps best be summed in the closing remarks from that work:

"I am confident the space around my head swims with a savage notation of Spirit -- Air is very nearly boiling with vapor. Demons, Angels, the Hand of all Gods Principalities and Countenances reach unto me, alighting my thoughts with symbol, damnation and benedictions of Grace -- but I believe not in such things. I reject the anassociational being: I leave it to the weeping of widows, the emptiness of starving children and the saucer-eyed platitudes of religious yeoman. But my atheism, my unbelief does not diminish the abilities of the Invisible to set ablaze in my life a firmament of Association. Each trembling filament of my thought becomes an epileptic paean to these mute Powers, to the leering apologia of my bent knee and to my servitude under the everlasting existence of things that, quite simply, do not exist."

Non-Canonical Text

Like a Gnostic receding in the mirror, Gnostic Materialists retreat from Sophia and reject the pleroma. Believing that substance is tainted through knowledge, they seek a state of mute slumber with dumb apes. As such, they serve as disruptive element in civilization and elevate the Dark Ages to the status of a Golden Age. Both ornery and capricious, their philosophical convolutions and warped logical extremities are almost predictable in their unpredictability. Their yearning for the opened head, for example, is driven by an understanding that the Gnosis is released in this state, for they believe that dull, gray substance of the brain seeks to rid itself of the mind.

See Also

• Ablation
• God

Desiderata