Jeff Kripal is introducing the Victoria Nelson, author of The Secret Life of Puppet. Let’s hear her shine!
Victoria says she often saw “Just say no to Manichaeasm” at Berkley California. Cool!
Now she’s summarizing Gnosticism.
She talks about how in Gnostic myths humans have no life until the spirit of Sophia is breathed into them. Adam is often depicted like a worm (aka Frankenstein Monster).
She talks about Vladimir Sorokin, a Russian writer who wrote the Ice trilogy (I never read it). The works are a spanning historical world where he captures the grammar and mannerisms of changing Russian times.
The plot speaks of a person looking for the meteorite from the Russian Roswell. No fragments have ever been found, even if miles of forest were destroyed.
The protagonist, as he gets close somewhere in Siberia, feels a force calling him. He leaves the group. He reaches the tip of the meteorite, which is some magical force. He is transformed into a being by this meteorite, free of pain of loss. His mind is filled with the genesis of the universe. Reality began with a 23000-pointed light called Grow. The light creates Earth, which is a mistake. The 2300-pointed light is trapped in Earth and breaks up into evolution and evolves into humans.
Sound familiar?
The meteorite is one of the 23000-pointed light that was left behind, coming back to remind the other light of its true origin. The protagonist is the first one to awaken.
The protagonist then finds other followers and begin a heretical sect in Communist Russia. They are the Children of the Light. Of course the Bolsheviks and their descendants are portrayed as demiurgic fools.
His “Gnostic” group realizes that they must wage war against humanity, as only a few will awaken. They are no peaceful Gnostics, but violent revolutionaries, immortal and passing through time gradually destroying communism.
I keep getting the images of the beginning Frozen, except very violent. They go around with ice hammer killing people, although if tapped on the chest a person may awaken, like some Loki in The Avengers.
Humans without the divine spark are called meat machines or the Empty.
The second novel has these Children of Light appearing after Russia has becoming democratic.
In the third novel, the Children of Light have a massive corporation with their special ice that can control humans. The Children of Light, almost 23000, wait on a Chinese island to be taken up back to their “Pleroma.”
The ascension seems to fail as the 23000 are dead, like Heaven’s Gate or the Jim Jones cult. Did their spirits leave their bodies?
Seems the 23000 rays crashed against the true God; we find that humans are the only ones that can have true divinity, two slave humans realize. They go back to humanity to talk to God by interacting with other humans.
They are the new Adam and Eve.
That’s the summary, and I wish it was better than the wonderful presentation.
This work, not just Gnostic, but in the UFO/Left Behind. It harkens to Escape to Witch Mountain, Pynchon’s V, and the Gnostic novel Flicker.
Sorokin says he was inspired by Fitzgerald’s The Diamond as Big as the Ritz.