Not in His Image: Gnostic Vision, Sacred Ecology, and the Future of Belief

Description

By John Lamb Lash
Trade paperback book
ISBN 9781931498920

Long before the birth of Christianity, monotheism was an anomaly; Europe and the Near East flourished under the divine guidance of Sophia, the ancient goddess of wisdom. The Earth was the embodiment of Sophia and thus sacred to the people who sought fulfillment in her presence. This ancient philosophy was threatening to the emerging salvation-based creed of Christianity that was based on patriarchal dominion over the Earth and lauded personal suffering as a path to the afterlife. Lash relates how this little-known messianic sect propelled itself into a dominant world power, systematically wiping out the great Gnostic spiritual teachers, the Druid priests, and the shamanistic healers of Europe and North Africa. Their zealous followers burned libraries and destroyed temples in an attempt to silence the ancient truth-tellers and keep their own secrets. Lash delves deeply into the shadows of ancient Gnostic writings to reconstruct the story early Christians tried to scrub from the pages of history, exploring the richness of the ancient European Pagan spirituality, the Pagan Mysteries, the Great Goddess, Gnosis, the myths of Sophia and Gaia, and mapping a (re) vision of the future of sacred ecology and spiritual practice. For as Lash reveals, when the truth is the planet Earth it cannot be hidden or destroyed.