This God Takes Some Getting Used To

Everything is an apparition, nothing to do with good, bad, acceptance or rejection. One may well burst out in laughter.
Longchenpa

“Once upon a very long time ago, when the very first Mommy and Daddy starred in the world’s first piece of Reality Programming, an unexpected snafu occurred, the sort that drives producers and program executives nuts. Mommy, whose name was Eve, began to act up. She began to question the so-called reality of her show, which was known by the title: GENESIS: In the Beginning.

Eve sat naked on her haunches beneath the forest canopy, alert as always to the sights and sounds of Eden, while Daddy, who was called Adam, snored bearishly at her side. Adam could not seem to get enough of the good things in the Garden, and spent much of his day in a somnolent state, occasionally muttering, in the peculiar argot of those times, “This is as good as it gets.” Eve was not so sure. She had seen distorted faces reflected in dewdrops, heard urgent things in the whisper of the giant ferns. Unsettling things. She had sensed the presence of Others. And yet, there were no others, were there? Surely, the watchful eyes of the timid tree creatures could not alone account for her feeling that she walked in the shadow of another reality. Adam’s belly was filled with the ripe fruit of the Garden; Eve’s belly was filled with Adam’s seed. She touched her swollen breasts, and it was then she heard her own name called from afar. She rose and followed the call to the depths of the forest, where there stood a tree whose alluring red fruit she had been warned in a dream not to eat. Dangling by its tail from a low branch was a creature with the body of a salamander and a face eerily familiar to Eve, a face not unlike her own.

“Who? Are? You?” the serpent mouthed.
“I don’t know,” said Eve, not having thought a lot about it.
“Why play along,” the serpent asked, “when you know the show is rigged? Why remain in prison when the cell door is open?”
“Where is this door?” asked Eve, innocently enough.
The serpent rolled its eyes upward, beyond the leafy canopy to the radiance above. Eve’s gaze followed, and lingered, and when she looked again at the tree, the shiny, red fruit was before her.
“Take. Eat,” said the serpent.
“Then I shall surely die,” said Eve.
“Only on television,” said the serpent. “Only to illusion.”

And Eve ate, and was amazed, and ran back to rouse Adam from his torpor, saying, “Try this! It’s amazing!” Adam, never one to resist a new treat, ate also of the apple, and when he had, turned to Eve and said, “Whoa.” He shook the sleep from his head, thumped his chest and roared, presumably to the show’s seldom seen Producer, ”Why didn’t you tell me it was a setup?” With a mighty groan, he stood, took Eve’s hand and said, “Let’s get dressed and get the hell out of here, honey. This is a sham.”

There were suddenly thunderous footfalls in the Garden, and Adam was sore afraid. When he came in dreams, the show’s Producer had always been a petulant screamer, forever reminding Adam of his contract and the dire consequences of asking too many questions. A nasal voice on a bullhorn honked through Eden, causing the forest creatures to tremble. “I AM THE GREAT AND POWERFUL IALDABAOTH, AND YOU TWO INGRATES WILL NEVER WORK IN THIS TOWN AGAIN!”
And so began Eve and Adam’s long journey home.”

~ A. W. Hill, Genesis Unplugged - The Fall of Man as seen from the Gnostic perspective

“On May 7, 2004, as dusk was falling, a plume of black smoke as big and ornery as a Texas twister rose above Los Angeles. And though no one later raved on local talk radio that he’d seen the face of the devil in the ominous cloud, a knowing onlooker in a sufficiently altered state might well have glimpsed the Whore of Babylon, the face of the eternal Rome to which Philip K. Dick referred when he famously wrote: “The Empire never ended.”

The rundown, two-story building at 4516 Hollywood Boulevard, which for 27 years had been the peculiar home of Bishop Stephan A. Hoeller’s Ecclesia Gnostica, was in flames. No one was injured, and the vessels of communion were salvaged, but unbeknownst to most, a landmark of hidden Hollywood had been lost. In this tiny hole-in-the-wall of a chapel, to the streetside accompaniment of bleating horns, sirens and the occasional gunshot, the gnomish and erudite Dr. Hoeller had held forth most every Friday night on subjects ranging from Kabbalah and Sufism to the psychedelic sacraments of Eleusis. And on each Sunday, he’d lighted the incense, donned his vestments and conducted a mass that was Catholic in all but its subtly subversive liturgy, for Hoeller is a Gnostic, and the sole American bishop consecrated by the Duc de Palatine, mysterious bearer of the English Gnostic Transmission.

The word is gnostic (nah-stick), from the Greek gnosis (inner knowledge), and as opposed to agnostics, who claim to know nothing of the divine, Gnostics are privy to a secret both terrible and wondrous. It is a knowledge that has kept them underground for 1,800 years, tarred as heretics by the Christian orthodoxy. It’s hard to say whether or not Cardinal Roger Mahony has ever heard of Stephan Hoeller, but it’s not difficult to imagine that there are nights when he wakes to see a shadow on the wall, an elfin shadow with a Beat Era goatee and a round belly. Gnosticism is the dog that nips at Rome’s heels, the orphaned child tugging at its cuffs, reminding the Church of what — and whom — it left behind. For nearly two millennia, the family secret was safely in the crypt, but in 1945, as we shall see, the ground shifted, and in the early years of our new century, thanks in some ironic measure to the very mainstream success of The Matrix and The Da Vinci Code, the vault burst open. Stephan Hoeller is the counter-cardinal of an L.A. nobody knows, and until last year’s fire destroyed his church, he was the bishop of Hollywood Boulevard.

In less than one hour, the L.A. outpost of what one Catholic apologist has called “the most dreaded foe the Christian faith has ever confronted” was in ruins. The size and fury of the blaze belied its humble origins, but may have been attributable to what the LAPD suspects was a methamphetamine lab operating in an upstairs apartment. A junkie and her boyfriend had rented the flat for years, and therein lies an irony that would not be lost on Gnostic sensibilities. The fire that gutted Hoeller’s sanctuary was not lit by torch-bearing fundamentalists or commandos employed by Opus Dei, but was the consequence of a modern affliction engendered by the sorrow of being “trapped,” to paraphrase comic icon Howard the Duck, “in a world we never made.”

Like the Adam and Eve of Gnosticism’s alternative Genesis (see sidebar following article), the recipient of gnosis awakens one day to the sobering realization that the world we live in is, in Hoeller’s words, “the flawed creation of a flawed Creator,” and that we are “strangers, lost in a world that is ill-fitting and absurd.” From that moment on, perception is altered, belief is cast aside in favor of experience, dogma is abandoned and the search for the True God begins. Oh, yes, Virginia, there is a God, if not quite the God of your Fathers. This God would not bar you from the priesthood, or seek to keep you barefoot and pregnant, but this God also might not be invoked by a Tori Amos song. This God takes some getting used to.

If it’s not apparent how dangerous such an altered worldview is, and why it once led straight to dungeon and stake, consider this: Just as you can’t smoke a joint and take a politician seriously, you can’t experience gnosis and take the business of the world — producing and consuming — to be of terribly great consequence. Gnosticism embodies the eternal counterculture, and as with expansion of consciousness by any other means, it has always been a grave threat to the established order. In the Gnostic Genesis, not only is Eve the heroine and the serpent in effect her fairy godmother, but the tyrant of Eden is none other than Jehovah, the Old Testament God who would “have no others before him.” The Gnostics know him as the Demiurge — the “Half-Maker” — or Ialdabaoth. So who or what, then, is the God of the Gnostics? It is both aeons away, and closer than we think. It is, to quote Hoeller’s liturgy, “that whose name not but the silence can express.”

We are through the looking glass, and the disorientation can be profound. But to attend a Sunday mass at the old Ecclesia Gnostica, you’d have been forgiven for not noticing right away. Most of the liturgy would be familiar to any Catholic, as would the vestments worn by Bishop Hoeller and his clergy. Only the place, and perhaps the parishioners, would make you feel you had picked the wrong door and wandered into a catacomb art-directed by David Lynch and populated with extras cast by Tim Burton.

There were no flying buttresses or gothic arches at 4516 Hollywood Blvd, only a low-ceilinged, rectangular room barely 24-by-12-feet, appointed with images of the Babylonian prophet Mani and the psychoanalytic pioneer Carl Gustav Jung, a draped flag bearing a Templar cross, and an array of chivalric symbols and Christian icons suggestive of a mode of worship far removed in time. For a resident of daylight Los Angeles, arriving with Starbucks cup in hand, the very act of crossing the threshold could seem both furtive and daring, like entering a graveyard after midnight for a rendezvous or crashing a very private wedding party. But heads never turned to regard the trespasser, either with false welcome or slit-eyed suspicion. One could enter and leave for months, as I did, without getting busted. It was a genuine sanctuary.

The parishioners, in those days never more than the room could accomodate, were as off-center as the locale. Generally over 30, almost invariably unaccompanied, they were the people of the periphery, those you glimpse in the rearview mirror. The people whose names you never learn: the tall Asian gentleman whose mystique was undiminished by his frayed collar; the pretty, pensive young woman, her jaw tight with some concealed anguish; the spinster in the high-collared dress who had probably read every book in the library. Quiet people, but not conformists. They had two qualities in common: They were introverts in an extroverted culture, and thereby misfits, and they had faces that spoke of a somewhat endangered species of intelligence.

The Hollywood Ecclesia Gnostica filled with incense and plainsong as Hoeller entered, wearing his lavender skullcap and preceded by the cross, just as it does now each Sunday morning in its new (and considerably more spacious) digs in Atwater Village. The Mass proceeds as it has for centuries with a Collect (the call to worship), a Lesson, a reading from the Gospel, at first glance distinguished from the ritual of Saint Peter’s Church only by the presence of both male and female clergy. But if you listen well, odd things begin to present themselves to your ears, as if the well-known liturgy were mutating in the heat of the sacrament. Here, for instance, is the Gnostic take on the prayer known to all Catholics as the Hail Mary (“Hail Mary, full of grace . . .”):

“Hail, Sophia, filled with light, the Christ is with Thee. Blessed art Thou among the Aeons, and blessed is the liberator of Thy light, Jesus. Holy Sophia, Mother of all gods, pray to the light for us, Thy children, now and in the hour of our death. Amen…

In 1958, Hoeller was ordained a priest of the American Catholic Church by the bishop of the Church of Saint Francis in Laguna Beach. The ACC was a schismatic branch, and decidedly not on the Vatican’s party list. A year later, Hoeller founded his own parish at Melrose and Western and christened it Ecclesia Gnostica, drawing a small congregation from attendees of his frequent lectures at the Philosophical Research Society in Los Feliz. In 1967, while down the street the Doors held court at the Whisky, a visiting British Gnostic prelate known as Richard, Duc de Palatine, dubbed Hoeller a bishop of the Pre-Nicene Gnostic Catholic Church. It was the Summer of Love, and as Hoeller puts it, Gnostics “looked with great interest on the consciousness-raising endeavors of the counterculture” for signs of a genuine revival of their tradition. He knew by then what to look for, for only a few years earlier, Hoeller himself had broken on through to the other side. His faith was now beyond belief. It was a matter of experience.”

~ A.W. HILL, Exile in Godville - Profile of a postmodern heretic

[Bishop Stephan Hoeller conducts Sunday services, and lectures at 8:00 p.m. on almost every Friday night of the year, at Ecclesia Gnostica, in its new location at 3363 Glendale Blvd. in Atwater Village. He is the author of Gnosticism: New Light on the Ancient Tradition of Inner Knowing, The Gnostic Jung and The Fool’s Pilgrimage, and can be tracked down at www.gnosis.org.\