The Gnostic New Age

This book represents a paradigm shift in our understanding of religion and breaks new ground in scholarship on Gnosticism. -- Birger A. Pearson, University of California, Santa Barbara Anyone interested in New Age spirituality in all its diversity and fullness will savor the pages of April DeConick's latest masterpiece, The Gnostic New Age. DeConick's portraits of ancient Gnostic movements are provocative and compelling; finding connections between these ancient worldviews and our own in the modern West through popular culture and movies is a stroke of absolute genius. This book finds Gnosticism approachable, thought-provoking, and still vibrant today: a fascinating and fun read! -- Nicola Denzey Lewis, Author of Introduction to Gnosticism: Hidden Voices, Ancient Worlds April Deconick has produced a fascinating, provocative, and readable interpretation of the Gnostic and Gnosticism. She rejects the binary prevalent in contemporary scholarship, that Gnosticism is either a latecoming heretical outgrowth of Christianity or simply an alternative form of Christianity that became demonized. She instead emphasizes the transgressive nature of Gnostic spirituality, a spirituality that confronted typical ancient spiritualities that made human beings subservient to the gods. This is a brave new salvo in the ongoing Gnostic Wars. -- Brent Landau, The University of Texas at Austin Scholarship on the histories of gnosticism, esotericism and mysticism has long glowed at the radioactive core of the comparative study of religion, at once empowering and inspiring some of the most influential writers and theorists. April DeConick's work shines in this lineage. In her new book, she demonstrates in rich detail how a new spiritual orientation that looks to a transcendent hidden God and engages in a radical criticism of ecclesial religion was first articulated in the ancient period and then resonated through the centuries up to the present day, where it can best be seen in contemporary popular culture, film and New Age thought, revelation and experience. Enter the Gnostic New Age. April DeConick's The Ancient New Age offers a valuable corrective to the recent reluctance of many scholars to use the term Gnosticism as a useful category to identify a distinctive late antique religion. For DeConick, Gnosticism is not so much an identifiable religion as it is a form of late antique spirituality, a way of being in the world, an attempt to consciously realize that the essential human self is nothing less than the supreme divinity's very own life essence lying dormant and unrecognized within the core human self, waiting to be awakened and reunite with its divine source. As her title suggests, DeConick illustrates this spirituality as analogous to various modern New Age self-realization movements reflected in contemporaryliterature and cinema. This very readable volume traces the migration of this Gnostic spirituality from ancient Egtpt through early and later antique Hellenic and Biblical religions--including Platonism, Hermeticism, later Judaism, and Pauline, Johannine and proto-othordox Christianity--to the full-fledged religions of Mandeaism and Manichaeanism. -- John D. Turner, University of Nebraska-Lincoln April Deconick has forcefully and elegantly thrown herself into the current scholarly debate on the Gnostics. In a book that is both rich in historical detail and passionate for deeper understanding, Deconick argues that Gnostic spirituality not only provided a transformative and liberating experience for ancient devotees, it can, even more, challenge and subvert the views of religious questers of the present, illuminating the modern search for spiritual truth. -- Bart Ehrman, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill