{"id":53,"date":"2012-03-18T11:52:44","date_gmt":"2012-03-18T01:52:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/stevewatson.info\/blog\/2012\/03\/18\/completing-the-vision-of-mary\/"},"modified":"2012-03-18T21:13:46","modified_gmt":"2012-03-18T11:13:46","slug":"completing-the-vision-of-mary","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stevewatson.info\/blog\/2012\/03\/18\/completing-the-vision-of-mary\/","title":{"rendered":"Completing the Vision of Mary"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Gospel of Mary<\/a>, recovered in fragments in Greek (Papyrus Berolinensis<\/em> 8502, Rylands<\/em> III 463) and Coptic (BG 8502) is part of the Nag Hammadi Library (Robinson, J.M. (1990 revd. edn.) NHL<\/em>, Harper Collins, pp. 523-7. Intro: K. King, tr: G. W. MacRae & R. McL. Wilson) and is generally supposed to be a Greek composition of the 2nd C. It contains a report of a vision experienced by Mary that is remarkable in a number of ways. It represents the progress of a soul towards release from the world, which sounds vaguely Indian but is just a feature of the neoplatonically inspired gnostic ideology in which the body is the sinful wrapper of the soul that needs to be shucked off for perfection to be achieved. The author of Mary thus is one of those who considers sin to be a category of being rather than a possible characteristic of the soul \u2013 much less an affliction. The fact that Mary is the voice of authority is also pretty strange, given the patriarchalism of the general culture of the time, and that there are no convincing indications elsewhere of an alternative culture of female empowerment, so what is the point of this attribution? How would it help gain acceptance for the teachings here? Finally, and this is my own interest, that progress is interrupted by the opposition of guardian spirits<\/a> (powers) at each level, another instance of a frequent feature of apocalyptic ascensions whose origin I find it difficult to explain. <\/font><\/p>\n

The text is so short that I can copy the relevant section (of chapter 8 ) here.<\/font><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. And desire said, I did not see you descending, but now I see you ascending. Why do you lie since you belong to me?<\/li>\n
  2. The soul answered and said, I saw you. You did not see me nor recognize me. I served you as a garment and you did not know me.<\/li>\n
  3. When it said this, it (the soul) went away rejoicing greatly.<\/li>\n
  4. Again it came to the third power, which is called ignorance.<\/li>\n
  5. The power questioned the soul, saying, Where are you going? In wickedness are you bound. But you are bound; do not judge!<\/li>\n
  6. And the soul said, Why do you judge me, although I have not judged?<\/li>\n
  7. I was bound, though I have not bound.<\/li>\n
  8. I was not recognized. But I have recognized that the All is being dissolved, both the earthly things and the heavenly.<\/li>\n
  9. When the soul had overcome the third power, it went upwards and saw the fourth power, which took seven forms.<\/li>\n
  10. The first form is darkness, the second desire, the third ignorance, the fourth is the excitement of death, the fifth is the kingdom of the flesh, the sixth is the foolish wisdom of flesh, the seventh is the wrathful wisdom. These are the seven powers of wrath.<\/li>\n
  11. They asked the soul, Whence do you come slayer of men, or where are you going, conqueror of space?<\/li>\n
  12. The soul answered and said, What binds me has been slain, and what turns me about has been overcome,<\/li>\n
  13. and my desire has been ended, and ignorance has died.<\/li>\n
  14. In an aeon I was released from a world, and in a Type from a type, and from the fetter of oblivion which is transient.<\/li>\n
  15. From this time on will I attain to the rest of the time, of the season, of the aeon, in silence.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    Note the structure here:<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n
    Power<\/strong><\/td>\nForm<\/strong><\/td>\nChallenge<\/strong><\/td>\nResponse<\/strong><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
    1st<\/sup><\/td>\n[Darkness]<\/td>\n[Where are you going?]<\/td>\n[?]<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
    2nd<\/sup><\/td>\nDesire<\/td>\n[1. How did I not see you descending?]<\/p>\n

    2. Why do you lie?<\/td>\n

    		I was a garment for you, so you didn\u2019t see me<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
    3rd<\/sup><\/td>\nIgnorance<\/td>\n1. Where are you going?<\/p>\n

    2. You are bound. Do not judge!<\/td>\n

    		1. You judge. I do not. I was bound. I do not bind.<\/p>\n

    2. I know that things pass<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n

    4th<\/sup><\/td>\n1. Darkness,<\/p>\n

    2. Desire,<\/p>\n

    3. Ignorance,<\/p>\n

    4. The Excitement of Death,<\/p>\n

    5. The Kingdom of the Flesh,<\/p>\n

    6. Foolish Wisdom of the Flesh,<\/p>\n

    7. Wrathful Wisdom<\/td>\n

    		Whither and whence?<\/td>\nI am free of bonds, perversions, desire, and ignorance.<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/table>\n

    <\/font>
    \nThere are apparently only 4 powers to be overcome \u2013 or levels intervening between the soul and liberation. And note that the 2nd<\/sup> and 3rd<\/sup> Powers are also the 2nd<\/sup> and 3rd<\/sup> Forms of the 4th<\/sup> Power. I suppose we can guess that the 1st<\/sup> Power is Darkness as it is the 1st<\/sup> Form of the 4th<\/sup> Power.<\/font><\/p>\n

    The challenges and responses and the powers involved don\u2019t seem to have any rational relationship. The challenges concern themselves firstly with the origins and intentions of the progress of the soul. The challenge from the 2nd<\/sup> Power may be completed as an accusation that the soul did not descend but belongs in the lower realm and therefore may not leave it. What the challenge and response to the 1st<\/sup> Power might be can only be guessed. There don\u2019t seem to be relevant models for this in other ascension narratives (and I agree that this is only partially an ascension narrative of the standard apocalyptic kind.) My guess would be that the challenge would be again \u2018Where are you going?\u2019 since it is explicit at 3 and 4 and implicit at 2. The likelihood also is that the challenge and response refer to the incarnation of the soul as do the 2nd<\/sup> and 3rd<\/sup>, while the 4th<\/sup> and final stage describes the liberation that occurs. This topic is also that which concerns the first extant part of the Gospel. The response is probably drawn from material that immediately precedes the part of the text that we have, as the responses for 2 and 3 occur in the material that begins the extant section. It could probably be determined if we knew the particular cosmological ideology of the writer, which could be determined by identifying the Gnostic school to which he belonged.<\/font><\/p>\n

    (An alternative interpretation is presented in Rasimus, T. et al. (2010) Stoicism in Early Christianity<\/a> Baker, ch. 10.)<\/font><\/p>\n

    <\/font><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    The Gospel of Mary, recovered in fragments in Greek (Papyrus Berolinensis 8502, Rylands III 463) and Coptic (BG 8502) is part of the Nag Hammadi Library (Robinson, J.M. (1990 revd. edn.) NHL, Harper Collins, pp. 523-7. Intro: K. King, tr: G. W. MacRae & R. McL. Wilson) and is generally supposed to be a Greek […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[16,22,26,27],"class_list":["post-53","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-religion","tag-apocalypse","tag-ascension","tag-gnosis","tag-neoplatonism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevewatson.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevewatson.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevewatson.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevewatson.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevewatson.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=53"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevewatson.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevewatson.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=53"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevewatson.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=53"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevewatson.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=53"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}