#5820882 in Books BRILL 2013-03-28Original language:EnglishPDF # 1 9.61 x .69 x 6.29l; 1.04 #File Name: 9004245480220 pages
Review
5 of 7 people found the following review helpful. You are ignorant slaves of fate; we have been released from fateBy Michael HoffmanI had my university library order this book in hardcover and electronic form.People in Mediterranean antiquity including Jews; Pagans; Gnostics; and Christians; around the 1st Century; believed in fatedness. Then around the 2nd Century; people adopted a rhetoric of transcending fatedness; while disparaging other people or the other groups as being ignorant and being slaves to fate. This book supports the 3-tiered systematic analysis in my Egodeath theory; in which we move through three stages during initiation experiences:1. Ignorant freewill thinking.2. Enlightened realization of fatedness and personal noncontrol. This stage disparages stage 1 (ignorant freewill thinking).3. Transcending fatedness to gain a transcendent freedom. This stage conflates and disparages stage 1 (ignorant freewill thinking) and stage 2 (realization of fatedness and personal noncontrol).Lewis' analysis is not as systematic; but supports this explanation of how stage 2 was first positively valued and then later was negatively valued.Lewis shows that competition and rhetoric inflation led all the groups (Jews; pagans; Christians; gnostics) to praise themselves as having true freedom and disparage the other people as being both ignorant (per stage 1) and slaves of fate (as realized in stage 2). People didn't complain of themselves being enslaved by fate; they disparaged other people as being ignorant and enslaved by fate. However; during initiation; as I have analyzed; the experience of fatedness and personal noncontrol give rise to panic and egodeath; which amounts to suffering enslavement by fate.Lewis misses this point and understates the intensity of ancient experience of enslavement to fate; she argues that enslavement to fate was mere rhetoric; but in fact enslavement to fate was intense peak experiencing. Lewis' theory is literary scholarship unplugged from intense; lightning-bolt; ancient experiential transformation of consciousness. Once this connection is made; from initiation experience to the encounter with fatedness; Lewis' book can be corrected and recognized as relevant to explaining the heart of religious origins in antiquity.IntroductionChapter 1: Were the Gnostics Cosmic Pessimists?Chapter 2: Nag Hammadi and the Providential CosmosChapter 3: 'This Body of Death': Cosmic Malevolence and Enslavement to Sin in Pauline ExegesisChapter 4: 'Heimarmene' at Nag Hammadi: 'The Apocryphon of John' and 'On the Origin of the World'Chapter 5: Middle Platonism; Heimarmene; and the Corpus HermeticumChapter 6: Ways Out I: Interventions of the Savior GodChapter 7: Ways Out II: Baptism and Cosmic Freedom: A New GenesisChapter 8: Astral Determinism in the Gospel of JudasChapter 9: Conclusions; and a New Way ForwardSelected BibliographySubject Index-- Michael Hoffman; the Egodeath theorist
