Myths told around fires quelled the cold and darkness of the night since the dawn of storytelling. Myths evolve by taking elements and characters from old stories and transplanting them into new stories. They share common regional threads and shape the cultures from place to place and from people to people.
Were still mythmakers today, most obviously in superhero movies or graphic novels. We love to revise myths drawing from Greek gods and goddesses, or Nordic tales. Loki and Thor come to mind in the Marvel Comic series by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby. Madeline Miller wrote Circe, published in 2018, and Margaret Atwood wrote The Penelopiad which was published in The Myths series by Canongate Books.
Revisionist mythmaking casts the meaning of ancient stories through a new lens, to appeal to modern readers who are hungry for heroes that understand the world they live in. In Karen Armstrong’s book, A Short History of Myth, she explains how we transcend the mundane with myths and other art forms or activities.
An experience of transcendence has always been part of the human experience. We seek out moments of ecstasy, when we feel deeply touched within and lifted momentarily beyond ourselves. At such times, it seems that we are living more intensely than usual, firing on all cylinders, and inhabiting the whole of our humanity. Religion has been one of the most traditional ways of attaining ecstasy, but if people no longer find it in temples, synagogues, churches or mosques, they look for it elsewhere: in art, music, poetry, rock, dance, drugs, sex or sport. Like poetry and music, mythology should awaken us to rapture, even in the face of death and the despair we may feel at the prospect of annihilation. If a myth ceases to do that, it has died and outlived its usefulness. It is, therefore, a mistake to regard myth as an inferior mode of thought, which can be cast aside when human beings have attained the age of reason.1
Besides our rational new age looking down on mythology, religious taboos frown on retellings of stories anointed as unalterable truths by the ‘powers that be’. The church fathers in the early centuries of Christianity were watchdogs over what they had deemed divinely inspired truth. Once the books of the Bible were canonized and marked by the state and bishops as the gold standard, the legal ramifications of changing or diluting ‘the truth’ were harsh.
In spite of this, there were many Gnostic sects during those early centuries who felt they were free to be creative. The truth was found behind the words as secret knowledge and wasn’t set in stone. Truth was living and dynamic. They were seekers of knowledge, or gnosis, who refused to be silenced by organized religion. The authors among them were revisionist mythmakers who used old stories to tell new ones which reshaped the context of their lives. They reimagined what being human meant and what divinity was. Their new myths demoted authorities and promoted gender fluid characters. This threatened the patriarchal messages in the canonized Bible. Nevertheless, Gnostics were determined to redefine what was sacred.
Why did the Gnostics need new stories?
While these authors were developing their stories, rulers of the Roman Empire were actively conquering land and bodies. The more land they captured, and the more people they conquered, and the more powerful they became. These people’s land and bodies had been seized. So they formed small sects because they felt that knowledge was the path out of their plight. Violence wasn’t the answer for them, so they leaned into the spirit because it was ungraspable and impenetrable. Therefore, they couldn’t be conquered, even in death. Sharing knowledge was the Gnostics’ nonviolent revolution. They revolted by reshaping familiar stories into a sustainable reality with new worlds and characters they could get behind and pass onto their children.
Consider an old house that has fallen into disrepair. The house has ‘good bones’, so the carpenter keeps the frame to build upon. The frame holds stories in its bones as homes tend to do. But the old gods that lived between these walls for so long haven’t delivered on their promises. So, the old walls are torn down and the old gods are demoted. Maybe they’re locked in the basement. A new roof and a new floor; a new heaven and a new earth is in order. New hope and new saviors are hoisted onto the frame, ones more intelligent and enlightened than the old frail ones.
In her article, “The Gnostic Imagination and Its Imaginaries”, April DeConick organizes the transition from old gods to new ones by pointing out that the old religions were based on certain ‘scripts’: the slave script, the vassal script, and the client script. In the slave script, gods are the masters of humans they created as slaves to serve them. In the vassal script, gods are kings and lawgivers, therefore humans serve them and rely on them for their survival. And in the client script, the gods are patrons with responsibilities toward humans who depend on their kindness. Humans must show their loyalty to the patron gods to receive favors. The Gnostics rejected all three.
These colonized people felt that their indigenous protector and patron Gods had failed them on the job. Their own faithfulness to the old Gods seemed ineffective to them. No matter what they did, they suffered. They wanted an explanation. They sought their answer in primordiality, hoping to learn first-hand how the traditional Gods came on the scene and what went wrong. They were convinced that behind the moral order there must stand a metaphysical order that makes sense.
So the Gnostics adopted a new script, the kinfolk script.
This script echoes the terror of families torn apart by involuntary conscription, piracy, kidnapping, and war. They develop the kinfolk theory of religion by imagining Gods and humans as biological next-of-kin rather than separate species. They begin to think about humans as mortal Gods who got separated from their divine parents.2
The Gnostics built a new home for their gods, one that was genetic, in their spiritual DNA, so to speak. Their mortal bodies became a home for the immortal spirit. They told new stories to support their new true selves. They had a special talent for completely flipping the script, rather than writing subtle revisions of old myths. Their origin stories were outright inversions of the Genesis creation story. The 'kinfolk script' they developed made the slavery, vassal, and patron scripts reproachable to most people struggling under patriarchal Roman rule. This new idea of being one big human and divine family attracted people to the Gnostic sects.
Celine Lillie describes this mythmaking paradigm shift in her book, Rape of Eve.
But a key difference between the divine household and the Roman/rulers’ household, is that the divine household never operates through violence or threat of violence. Even Wisdom, who has caused this rupture, is taken back into the fold. Though the divine household does operate under the virtues of consensus and concordia, these operate in terms of a paradigm based on mutual power-with, rather than violent power-over.3
The Gnostics lived in an oppressive society and a mortal physical prison, their bodies. Their longing for freedom and a new way of life found expression in their revisionist mythology. In the Gnostic mind, humans are the antidote to evil, not the cause of it. Not only did they demote the God of Genesis, but they made Eve into a hero and a savior. This enraged the Apostolic Roman Catholic church fathers because it threatened one of the foundational stories that upheld their patriarchal structure. As the Gnostic movement grew, the church fathers condemned them as heretics. Eventually, the Gnostic sects disappeared and the only writings about them that survived were works of heresiology written by the early church fathers. These were slanted to say the least. Then, in 1945, a cache of Gnostic codices were discovered in the hills of Nag Hammadi, Egypt. The Gnostics stories could finally speak for themselves, and they’re fascinating to read.
The Gnostic New World Order
Three of the Nag Hammadi texts begin, well, “in the beginning” to reconstruct the creation of the world, Adam and Eve, and the Tree of Knowledge.
The Origins of the World, The Hypostasis of the Archons (sometimes known as The Nature of the Rulers), and The Apocryphon (or Secret) Book of John are bold examples of revisionist mythmaking. These three texts, in particular, revise the Genesis story.
The world and its God had failed them. They felt imprisoned in their bodies and on the earth. Instead of the benevolent God of Genesis, the world must have been created by an evil god to enslave them. That was their reality, so that’s the story they told. The Roman Empire was oppressive and the rulers were ignorant, blind and arrogant. The creator of the world, Yaldabaoth, was their main antagonist and he along with his minions were mythical characters that reflected the rulers and authorities of the Roman Empire. They were, of course, also ignorant, blind, and arrogant.
Lillie provides an apt description of the evil characters that personified their lived reality.
Despite substantial differences between the three Genesis cosmogonies, there is an overwhelmingly consistent portrait in all three regarding the rulers, authorities, and powers of Yaldabaoth’s world. They are given a wide array of unbecoming descriptors, including violent, beastly, deceptive, lustful, arrogant, power-hungry, greedy, wealth obsessed, self-serving, war-mongering, unjust, foolish, jealous, and ignorant—and, topping it all off, they think they are gods. These characterizations are remarkably similar to the ways in which the rulers (and gods) are portrayed in the Roman founding narratives discussed at the beginning of this study.4
Yaldabaoth’s strategy, like the Roman authorities, was to build an empire by enslaving as many humans as possible and producing humans through women who were captured and raped. The chief ruler and his archons were the mirror image of the Roman patriarchy.
The character development of Yaldabaoth in Gnostic mythology is only one of many examples of how the Gnostics flipped the script of the Genesis story. It is indicative of their times, the culture they lived in, and the political hierarchy that oppressed them.
Changing the protagonist of the Genesis story, the benevolent creator God, into their main antagonist is only one example of many.
In upcoming posts, I’ll delve into the retellings of the origin of humankind, the inverted roles of Adam and Eve, a new way to look at the Tree of Knowledge, and the birth of a female savior.
Revisionist mythmaking is a little like shopping at a thrift store, especially for a religious studies student like me. I get to wander through a lot of aisles and discover aspects about the world’s religions, some that are similar and some vastly different. But all of them have threads woven into them from older stories. The writers reused and recycled old garments that don’t fit anymore and made new clothes tailored to fit into the cultures they live in to protect them and their children. I’m attracted to Gnostic mythology, because the stories are revisions of the Biblical stories that I grew up in. The authors struggled with the same injustices that I found in those old stories, but they wrote new ones. I applaud them and admire their boldness. They’ve become mentors or maybe even muses for me in my creative pursuits as a writer and a student.
Armstrong, Karen. A Short History of Myth (Canongate Myths series) (p. 8). Canongate Books. Kindle Edition.
DeConick, April. “The Gnostic Imagination and Its Imaginaries” Gnosis vol. 8, Issue 2, (p. 139) (July 2023): Brill. doi:10.1163/2451859X-00802001
Lillie, Celene. The Rape of Eve: The Transformation of Roman Ideology in Three Early Christian Retellings of Genesis. (p. 264) Lanham: National Book Network, 2017.
ibid.