The emotional categories of the last section may be said to reflect general human experiences which may spring up and find expression anywhere, though rarely in such emphatic forms. Another series of metaphors referring to the human condition in the world is more uniquely gnostic and recurs with great regularity throughout the whole range of gnostic utterance, regardless of linguistic boundaries. While earthly existence is on the one hand, as we just saw, characterized by the feelings of forlornness, dread, nostalgia, it is on the other hand described also as “numbness,” “sleep,” “drunkenness,” and “oblivion”: that is to say, it has assumed (if we except drunkenness) all the characteristics which a former time ascribed to the state of the dead in the underworld. Indeed, we shall find that in gnostic thought the world takes the place of the traditional underworld and is itself already the realm of the dead, that is, of those who have to be raised to life again. In some respects this series of metaphors contradicts the previous one: unconsciousness excludes fear. This is not overlooked in the detailed narrative of the myths: it is only the awakening from the state of unconsciousness (“ignorance”), effected from without, that reveals to man his situation, hitherto hidden from him, and causes an outburst of dread and despair; yet in some way these must have been at work already in the preceding state of ignorance, in that life shows a tendency to hold fast to it and to resist the awakening.

How did the state of unconsciousness come about, and in what concrete terms is it described? The “throw” as such would account for a numbness of the fallen soul; but the alien medium itself, the world as a demonic entity, has an active share in it. In the Manichaean cosmogony as related by Theodore bar Konai we read:

As the Sons of Darkness had devoured them, the five Luminous Gods [the sons of the Primal Man, and the substance of all the souls later dispersed in the world] were deprived of understanding, and through the poison of the Sons of Darkness they became like a man who has been bitten by a mad dog or a serpent.23

The unconsciousness is thus a veritable infection by the poison of darkness. We are dealing here, as in the whole group of the metaphors of sleeping, not with a mythological detail, a mere episode in a narrative, but with a fundamental feature of existence in the world to which the whole redemptional enterprise of the extra-mundane deity is related. The “world” on its part makes elaborate efforts to create and maintain this state in its victims and to counteract the operation of awakening: its power, even its existence, is at stake.

They mixed me drink with their cunning and gave me to taste of their meat. I forgot that I was a king’s son, and served their king. I forgot the Pearl for which my parents had sent me. Through the heaviness of their nourishment I sank into deep slumber.

(“Hymn of the Pearl” in the Acta Thomae)

Of the most constant and widest use is probably the image of “sleep.” The Soul slumbers in Matter. Adam, the “head” of the race and at the same time symbol of mankind, lies in deep slumber, of a very different kind from that of the biblical Adam: men in general are “asleep” in the world. The metaphor expresses man’s total abandonment to the world. Certain figures of speech underline this spiritual and moral aspect. Men are not just asleep but “love” the sleep (“Why will ye love the sleep, and stumble with them that stumble?”—G 181); they have abandoned themselves to sleep as well as to drunkenness (C.H. I. 27). Even realizing that sleep is the great danger of existence in the world is not enough to keep one awake, but it prompts the prayer:

According to what thou, great Life, saidst unto me, would that a voice might come daily to me to awaken me, that I may not stumble. If thou callest unto me, the evil worlds will not entrap me and I shall not fall prey to the Aeons.

(G 485)

The metaphor of sleep may equally serve to discount the sensations of “life here” as mere illusions and dreams, though nightmarish ones, which we are powerless to control; and there the similes of “sleep” join with those of “erring” and “dread”:

What, then, is that which He desires man to think? This: “I am as the shadows and phantoms of the Night.” When the light of dawn appears, then this man understands that the Terror which had seized upon him, was nothing. . . . As long as Ignorance inspired them with terror and confusion, and left them unstable, torn and divided, there were many illusions by which they were haunted, and empty fictions, as if they were sunk in sleep and as if they found themselves a prey to troubled dreams. Either they are fleeing somewhere, or are driven ineffectually to pursue others; or they find themselves involved in brawls, giving blows or receiving blows; or they are falling from great heights . . . [etc., etc.]: until the moment when those who are passing through all these things, wake up. Then, those who have been experiencing all these confusions, suddenly see nothing. For they are nothing—namely, phantasmagoria of this kind.

(GT 28:24-29:32)

Since the gnostic message conceives itself as the counter-move to the design of the world, as the call intended to break its spell, the metaphor of sleep, or its equivalents, is a constant component of the typical gnostic appeals to man, which accordingly present themselves as calls of “awakening.” We shall therefore meet these metaphors again and again when we deal with the “call.”

The metaphors of intoxication require special comment. The “drunkenness” of the world is a phenomenon peculiarly characteristic of the spiritual aspect of what the Gnostics understood by the term “world.” It is induced by the “wine of ignorance” (C.H. VII. 1), which the world everywhere proffers to man. The metaphor makes it clear that ignorance is not a neutral state, the mere absence of knowledge, but is itself a positive counter-condition to that of knowledge, actively induced and maintained to prevent it. The ignorance of drunkenness is the soul’s ignorance of itself, its origin, and its situation in the alien world: it is precisely the awareness of alienness which the intoxication is meant to suppress; man drawn into the whirlpool and made oblivious of his true being is to be made one of the children of this world. This is the avowed purpose of the powers of the world in proffering their wine and holding their “feast.” The drunkenness of ignorance is opposed by the “sobriety” of knowledge, a religious formula sometimes intensified to the paradox of “sober drunkenness.” 24 Thus in the Odes of Solomon we read:

From the Lord’s spring came speaking water in abundance to my lips. I drank and was drunken with the water of everlasting life, yet my drunkenness was not that of ignorance, but I turned away from vanity.

(Ode XI. 6-8)

He who thus possesses knowledge . . . [is like] a person who, having been intoxicated, becomes sober and having come to himself reaffirms that which is essentially his own.

(GT 22:13-20)

The orgiastic feast prepared by the world for the seduction of man, or more generally of the alien Life from beyond, is repeatedly described in extensive scenes in Mandaean writings. The following example occupies many pages in the original and is here greatly abridged. For the reader unfamiliar with Mandaean mythology we may just explain that Ruha is the demonic mother of the Planets and as the evil spirit of this world the main adversary of the sons of light.25

Ruha and the Planets began to forge plans and said, “We will entrap Adam and catch him and detain him with us in the Tibil. When he eats and drinks, we will entrap the world. We will practise embracing in the world and found a community in the world. We will entrap him with horns and flutes, so that he may not break away from us. . . . We will seduce the tribe of life and cut it off with us in the world . . . [G 113 f.]. Arise, let us make a celebration: arise, let us make a drinking-feast. Let us practise the mysteries of love and seduce the whole world! . . . The call of Life we will silence, we will cast strife into the house, which shall not be settled in all eternity. We will kill the Stranger. We will make Adam our adherent and see who then will be his deliverer. . . . We will confound his party, the party that the Stranger has founded, so that he may have no share in the world. The whole house shall be ours alone. . . . What has the Stranger done in the house, that he could found himself a party therein?” They took the living water and poured turbid [water] into it. They took the head of the tribe and practised on him the mystery of love and of lust, through which all the worlds are inflamed. They practised on him seduction, by which all the worlds are seduced. They practised on him the mystery of drunkenness, by which all the worlds are made drunken. . . . The worlds are made drunk by it and turn their faces to the Suf-Sea.26 (G 120 ff.)

We have only a few remarks to add to this powerful scene. The main weapon of the world in its great seduction is “love.” Here we encounter a widespread motif of gnostic thought: the mistrust of sexual love and sensual pleasure in general. It is seen as the eminent form of man’s ensnarement by the world: “The spiritual man shall recognize himself as immortal, and love as the cause of death” (C.H. I. 17); “He who has cherished the body issued from the error of love, he remains in the darkness erring, suffering in his senses the dispensations of death” (ibid. 19). More than sexual love is involved in this role of eros as the principle of mortality (to Plato it was the principle of the striving for immortality). The lust for the things of this world in general may take on many forms, and by all of them the soul is turned away from its true goal and kept under the spell of its alien abode.

Love not the world, neither the things that are in the world. If any man love the world, the love of the Father is not in him. For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life, is not of the Father, but is of the world.

(I John 2:15-16)

The three propensities mentioned here, “the lust of the flesh,” “the lust of the eyes,” and “the pride of life,” later serve Augustine   as main categories of the general “temptation” of the world (see Confess. X. 41 ff.). The “mystery of love” in the Mandaean text is a mythological version of the same idea. [Hans Jonas  ]