Lately I’ve been studying Gnosticism.
To be blunt, most of it reads like total hokum. The cosmology is absurd. And despite what modern Gnostics insist, Nicene Christianity didn’t win *solely* because of persecution. State backing mattered, but so did the fact that “salvation by faith” is simple, portable, and easy to teach. A maze of demiurges, pleromas, and aeons is not.
And Nicenes weren’t the only critics. Pagans attacked Gnostics too. Plotinus wrote an entire treatise arguing that their “gnosis” was confused and philosophically incoherent—an awkward problem for a movement built on the claim that it possessed superior knowledge.
Neo-Gnostics still say the Church wiped them out. But that’s not quite true.
The Mandaeans still practice. Estimates range from 60,000 to 100,000 worldwide. Their historic homelands are Iraq and Iran, where baptism remains central to their rites, though many members now live in diaspora.
But out of 30+ ancient Gnostic sects, only the Mandaeans remain recognizably Gnostic. Why? Because their system is relatively clear. One God. The power of Light. The immortality of the soul. A cosmology structured in threes—three emanations, three worlds. It’s coherent enough that you can explain the scaffolding without a dissertation.
That clarity helps. So does the fact they’re an ethno-religious community that traditionally rejects conversion and discourages marrying out.
There’s one other “survivor,” though it barely counts: Manichaeism.
It was once a genuine rival to Christianity. Augustine himself spent years as a Manichaean. And a Manichaean temple still exists in China, though most worshippers treat it as a Buddhist site. Syncretism kept it alive by blurring its identity.
That exposes the core problem. Gnosticism begins as syncretism, and syncretism dissolves what makes a religion distinct.
But even that isn’t the whole story. Gnosticism’s real competitor wasn’t Christianity—it was Hermeticism.
Hermeticism also promised salvation through knowledge, but inverted the cosmology. The world wasn’t a trap. The world was good. Ordered. Lawful. Worth studying. Governed by a higher power whose workings could be uncovered.
Hermeticism survived because it was useful. It claimed we perceive reality through altered modes of consciousness, and that these modes can be accessed through repeatable techniques. Alter the state, alter the perception—predictably.
That predictability fed straight into early natural philosophy, back when science and magic were still interwoven.
Gnostics, by contrast, dismissed the material world. When you write off the world, you don’t bother studying it. Hermetic thinkers did. Which is why Hermetic ideas fed into early astronomy, alchemy, and experimental method.
This is why Hermeticism shaped the world, while the only surviving Gnostic sect sits at the margins.
