G.R.S. Mead on the Gnostics
“The Gnostics were ever changing their nomenclature; the god of one
system might even be the devil of another! He who makes a
concordance of names merely, in Gnosticism, may think himself lucky
to escape a lunatic asylum; he, on the contrary, who seeks the idea
behind the name will often find himself in a realm of great beauty
and harmony of thought. Men like the Gnostics have ever had
intuitions of a real state of being, of definite and precise realms
of consciousness; yet each has caught a glimpse of the reality, as
all men must so long as they are imprisioned in a body. If the
Gnostics exhausted the philosophy and religion of their time in
striving to find a decent vestment for the naked truth, as they
thought they saw it, who shall blame them? Though they contradict
one another, in the view of the word-hunter, they do not contradict
themselves for the follower of ideas. The idea is the key which
opens the mysteries of the Gnosis, and those who refuse to use this
living key must be content to have the treasury closed against
them.”
