Fragments of a Faith Forgotten edition by GRS Mead Religion Spirituality eBooks
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This is one of the best books about the Gnostics written prior to the Nag Hammadi discoveries. G.R.S. Mead, who also translated the Pistis Sophia, summarizes what was known about the Gnostics at the turn of the 20th century. At that time, a better picture of the Gnostics was emerging, based on several papyri which had been recently discovered. Although there had been a lot of academic research on this subject, most of the key works were in German or French. Therefore this book and The Gnostics and Their Remains are the only two major books in English on this subject currently in the public domain.
It was becoming increasingly obvious that early Christianity was a wide spectrum of sects, the record of which had been subsequently forgotten or suppressed by the Church. The Gnostics had deep connections with ancient Mystery religions, Pythagoreanism, Hinduism and other ancient beliefs. Most of the sacred texts of Gnosticism were long lost or survived only in small quotes.
Mead draws on information provided both by the Early Church Fathers hostile to Gnosticism, and the available corpus of actual Gnostic documents at the time, cryptic and fragmentary as it was. He includes excerpts from previously untranslated manuscripts, and extensive summaries of the Pistis Sophia and the writings of the critics of Gnosticism. This book is required reading for anyone who wants to understand Gnosticism and the development of early Christianity.
Fragments of a Faith Forgotten edition by GRS Mead Religion Spirituality eBooks
This is a work of the utmost significance, from a spiritual and historical perspective, in regards to the true and hidden history of Christianity. In, Fragments of a Faith Forgotten: Some Short Sketches Among the Gnostics Mainly of the First Two Centuries by G. R. S. Mead; who was possibly the leading authority on the subject, we have a work of painstaking patience and dedication. In this book, this eminent scholar has compiled and pieced together some of the most important surviving documents and treatises that the various schools of the Gnostics had preserved for posterity, and that the early Church Fathers had tried in vain: to distort, discredit, hide, and just plain, blot out of existence, lest enlightened souls should come to know them.Here are some excerpts that I found to be exceptionally noteworthy:
From pages 26 – 27
“The Light was received by men in proportion to their capacity to understand it, and the Life was poured into them as their natures were capable of expansion. And if the subsequent history of the times, when the dark cloud of ignorance and intolerance settled down on Christendom for so many centuries, makes it appear as if that Life had been poured out in vain, and that Light radiated to no purpose, we should remember that they were lavished on souls and not on bodies; that the path of individual souls is not to be traced in the evolution of racial bodies. The souls incarnated into the civilisation of Greece and Rome who were capable of receiving the Light, were far different from the souls who were incarnated into the half barbarous hordes which destroyed that civilisation, and out of which the new races were to be developed. The old races which supplied the conditions for the experience of the more advanced souls, were to disappear gradually, and new races were to be developed, which in their childhood could not supply the necessary conditions for the incarnation of such subtle intellects, but which in their manhood would attract to them still higher souls perchance. This of course did not take place with suddenness, it was all very gradual, there was much overlapping of races, as the old units and atoms were slowly replaced by new ones. But how is it to be expected that Vandal and Goth could understand the great problems which delighted the minds of the philosophers and mystics of Greece and Rome? And further, must it not all have been foreseen and provided for by the Wisdom that watches over human affairs? Races and nations are born, and die, as men are born and die; they may be long-lived or short-lived, they may be good, bad, or indifferent. But whatever their characters and characteristics as compared with other races, their early period is that of childhood, their middle period that of manhood, and their later period that of old age. It follows then that as a general rule the class of souls which seeks experience in them in their childhood, is not the same as the grade of souls which incarnates in them in their middle age, or in their old age. Of course there are numerous individual exceptions, for the above is the merest outline of the elements of the problem; the details are so complicated, the permutations and combinations so innumerable, that no mind can fully grasp them.”
From pages 179 - 180
“The most interesting feature of the system which Irenæus has preserved for us, is the myth of the creation of man by the angels, or rather the fabrication of man’s external envelope by the hierarchies of the builders. The making of man was on this wise. A shining image or type was shown by the Logos to the demiurgic angels; but when they were unable to seize hold upon it, for it was withdrawn immediately, they said to one another: “Let us make man according to [this] image and likeness.” They accordingly endeavoured to do so, but the nature-powers could only evolve an envelope or plasm, which could not stand upright, but lay on the ground helpless and crawling like a worm. Then the Power Above, in compassion, sent forth the life-spark, and the plasm rose upright, and limbs developed and were knit together, that is to say, it hardened or became denser as race succeeded race; and so the body of man was evolved, and the light-spark, or real man, tabernacled, in it. This light-spark hastens back after death to those of its own nature, and the rest of the elements of the body are dissolved. Here we have in rough suggestion the same theory of the evolution of the bodies of the early races as we find advanced, from totally different sources and an entirely different standpoint, by a number of modern writers on theosophic doctrines---and, therefore, we all the more regret that the orthodox prejudices of Irenæus or his informant have treated Saturninus and his “heresy” with so scant notice.”
From pages 533 - 534
“The seals, names, and apologies of these powers are then given, and here unfortunately the text breaks suddenly off, and we come to the end of Schmidt’s Second Book of Ieou. Taking now Schmidt’s First Book we next come to a description of the middle Light-world, and its Ruler, the True God, the Demiurgos, above whom are the Treasures of the Plērōma of the Father. Jesus is still the narrator. The subject is one of immense complexity, with infinite emanations, treasures (i.e., storehouses of riches and fullness), spaces, orders, and hierarchies, with diagrams and symbols, and hosts of (to me) absolutely unintelligible “authentic” names, which are said to be “in the language of my Father.” The authentic name of the supernal Demiurgos is translated as the True God or God of Truth, and is given in Greek transliteration as Ieou, which Schmidt transliterates into German as Jeû. I would suggest that Ieou is a transliteration of the four-lettered mystery name of the creator according to Semitic and Chaldæan tradition, the tetragrammaton of the Kabalah. Theodoret tells us that the Samaritans pronounced this name Iabe (Iave) and the Jews Iaō. Since the sixteenth century, by adding the vowels of Adonai to the unpronounceable YHVH, it has been pronounced Jehovah. It is now generally written Yahweh; but there is no certainty in the matter, beyond the fact that Jehovah is absolutely wrong. Ieou or Iaō are probably attempts in Greek transliteration at the same Semitic name, which contained letters totally unrepresentable in Greek; Yahoo or Yahuwh perchance, the name hidden in Iacchus (Yach), still further corrupted into Bacchus by the Greeks. Iacchus was the mystery-name of the creative power in that great mystery tradition; Bacchus was the name in the popular cult.”
This is just a small sample of the inestimable breadth and value of this work. Mead, of course, was thankful and grateful in turn, to the work of the German and British scholars and academicians who had dedicated countless hours of research to the various works and texts that had been salvaged from the ruins of time (i.e., The Codex Brucianus, The Bruce and Askew Codices, The Akhmim Codex, etc.). But, it is to Mead that the student of the esoteric tradition owes an enormous debt of gratitude. He spent untold hours, deciphering and making sense of some of the most obscure, dismembered, and damaged treatises that the Church Fathers had neglected as previously aforementioned.
I highly recommend this book to the interested reader. This printing by Kessinger LLC, is absolute perfection.
Fragments Of A Faith Forgotten: Some Short Sketches Among The Gnostics by G. R. S. Mead, M. A. (originally published in 1900). Kessinger Legacy Reprints 2010.
Love and Peace,
Carlos Romero
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Fragments of a Faith Forgotten edition by GRS Mead Religion Spirituality eBooks Reviews
A very good translation and compilation of the original text. Makes it much easier to follow and understand.
Very easy to read with a plethora of information. Recommended for any one interested in this subject.
This is a book I own in hard copy and . It is a book to open your mind to other posibilities. Really a great read.
Glad I have this book. Helps to understand the earliest teachings of the followers of Jesus, before Nicaea.
I really liked the way Mead put this together in a flowing readable manner. Very interesting the first read. I'll reread it in a few months. I'm always looking for authors like this and was compelled to buy a few more of Mead's books.
Nobody will read through Mead's text but use it episodically to check on or find specific information. And there is no lack of it. Mead has patiently accumulated all the information he could gather on side-track Christianity with all its many shades. The variations on the theme of non-orthodox Christianity are incredibly profuse, as even a birds-eye view of the book reveals. This online version is however not as easy to handle as could be expected.
This is a very good book and far ahead of its time. G.R.S. Mead represents the movement of scholarship and research in religious texts to move away from the western "orthodox" Christian biases and to conduct research and investigations into other cultural beliefs with an open mind. This book is well over 100 years old and still has relevance. At the time little was known about Gnosticism as this was before the discovery, or at least the public or scholarly recognition of the discoveries at Nag Hammadi, so all Mead had to work with was few actual authentic texts and the quotes of the early Church Fathers who were notorious in there vehemence against the Gnostics. Certainly any tracts written by ones enemies must be taken with a grain of salt. Beyond the heresy hunters, there was the Pistis Sophia (an edition by Mead still selling today), the contents of the Askew, Bruce and Akimim Codices, and some fragments that found there way into non-canonical acts of the apostles.
Sometimes Mead gets a bit out of bounds - pondering if perhaps Jesus lived in 100 B.C. based on minor Talmud references, and comparing some of the aspects of a certain Gnostic system to parts of the human brain. Attempting to think outside of the box and to understand long forgotten and complex religious systems can lead one into minor dead ends or blind alleys. Overall I think this is an admirable work even today and I especially enjoy his chronological history of the early Gnostic individuals (legendary in some cases) and groups. Mead's association with Theosophy caused his work to be scorned or ignored by the scholars and "experts" of his own day (I am not a big Blavatsky fan myself), but after 100 years his works are still being sold while much of the work of these critical or dismissive contemporaries are utterly forgotten. In the modern Neo-Gnostic revival heralded by the public release and dissemination of the Nag Hammadi texts in English, Mead is something of a forerunner, a John the Baptist of the modern Gnostic discovery.
This is a work of the utmost significance, from a spiritual and historical perspective, in regards to the true and hidden history of Christianity. In, Fragments of a Faith Forgotten Some Short Sketches Among the Gnostics Mainly of the First Two Centuries by G. R. S. Mead; who was possibly the leading authority on the subject, we have a work of painstaking patience and dedication. In this book, this eminent scholar has compiled and pieced together some of the most important surviving documents and treatises that the various schools of the Gnostics had preserved for posterity, and that the early Church Fathers had tried in vain to distort, discredit, hide, and just plain, blot out of existence, lest enlightened souls should come to know them.
Here are some excerpts that I found to be exceptionally noteworthy
From pages 26 – 27
“The Light was received by men in proportion to their capacity to understand it, and the Life was poured into them as their natures were capable of expansion. And if the subsequent history of the times, when the dark cloud of ignorance and intolerance settled down on Christendom for so many centuries, makes it appear as if that Life had been poured out in vain, and that Light radiated to no purpose, we should remember that they were lavished on souls and not on bodies; that the path of individual souls is not to be traced in the evolution of racial bodies. The souls incarnated into the civilisation of Greece and Rome who were capable of receiving the Light, were far different from the souls who were incarnated into the half barbarous hordes which destroyed that civilisation, and out of which the new races were to be developed. The old races which supplied the conditions for the experience of the more advanced souls, were to disappear gradually, and new races were to be developed, which in their childhood could not supply the necessary conditions for the incarnation of such subtle intellects, but which in their manhood would attract to them still higher souls perchance. This of course did not take place with suddenness, it was all very gradual, there was much overlapping of races, as the old units and atoms were slowly replaced by new ones. But how is it to be expected that Vandal and Goth could understand the great problems which delighted the minds of the philosophers and mystics of Greece and Rome? And further, must it not all have been foreseen and provided for by the Wisdom that watches over human affairs? Races and nations are born, and die, as men are born and die; they may be long-lived or short-lived, they may be good, bad, or indifferent. But whatever their characters and characteristics as compared with other races, their early period is that of childhood, their middle period that of manhood, and their later period that of old age. It follows then that as a general rule the class of souls which seeks experience in them in their childhood, is not the same as the grade of souls which incarnates in them in their middle age, or in their old age. Of course there are numerous individual exceptions, for the above is the merest outline of the elements of the problem; the details are so complicated, the permutations and combinations so innumerable, that no mind can fully grasp them.”
From pages 179 - 180
“The most interesting feature of the system which Irenæus has preserved for us, is the myth of the creation of man by the angels, or rather the fabrication of man’s external envelope by the hierarchies of the builders. The making of man was on this wise. A shining image or type was shown by the Logos to the demiurgic angels; but when they were unable to seize hold upon it, for it was withdrawn immediately, they said to one another “Let us make man according to [this] image and likeness.” They accordingly endeavoured to do so, but the nature-powers could only evolve an envelope or plasm, which could not stand upright, but lay on the ground helpless and crawling like a worm. Then the Power Above, in compassion, sent forth the life-spark, and the plasm rose upright, and limbs developed and were knit together, that is to say, it hardened or became denser as race succeeded race; and so the body of man was evolved, and the light-spark, or real man, tabernacled, in it. This light-spark hastens back after death to those of its own nature, and the rest of the elements of the body are dissolved. Here we have in rough suggestion the same theory of the evolution of the bodies of the early races as we find advanced, from totally different sources and an entirely different standpoint, by a number of modern writers on theosophic doctrines---and, therefore, we all the more regret that the orthodox prejudices of Irenæus or his informant have treated Saturninus and his “heresy” with so scant notice.”
From pages 533 - 534
“The seals, names, and apologies of these powers are then given, and here unfortunately the text breaks suddenly off, and we come to the end of Schmidt’s Second Book of Ieou. Taking now Schmidt’s First Book we next come to a description of the middle Light-world, and its Ruler, the True God, the Demiurgos, above whom are the Treasures of the Plērōma of the Father. Jesus is still the narrator. The subject is one of immense complexity, with infinite emanations, treasures (i.e., storehouses of riches and fullness), spaces, orders, and hierarchies, with diagrams and symbols, and hosts of (to me) absolutely unintelligible “authentic” names, which are said to be “in the language of my Father.” The authentic name of the supernal Demiurgos is translated as the True God or God of Truth, and is given in Greek transliteration as Ieou, which Schmidt transliterates into German as Jeû. I would suggest that Ieou is a transliteration of the four-lettered mystery name of the creator according to Semitic and Chaldæan tradition, the tetragrammaton of the Kabalah. Theodoret tells us that the Samaritans pronounced this name Iabe (Iave) and the Jews Iaō. Since the sixteenth century, by adding the vowels of Adonai to the unpronounceable YHVH, it has been pronounced Jehovah. It is now generally written Yahweh; but there is no certainty in the matter, beyond the fact that Jehovah is absolutely wrong. Ieou or Iaō are probably attempts in Greek transliteration at the same Semitic name, which contained letters totally unrepresentable in Greek; Yahoo or Yahuwh perchance, the name hidden in Iacchus (Yach), still further corrupted into Bacchus by the Greeks. Iacchus was the mystery-name of the creative power in that great mystery tradition; Bacchus was the name in the popular cult.”
This is just a small sample of the inestimable breadth and value of this work. Mead, of course, was thankful and grateful in turn, to the work of the German and British scholars and academicians who had dedicated countless hours of research to the various works and texts that had been salvaged from the ruins of time (i.e., The Codex Brucianus, The Bruce and Askew Codices, The Akhmim Codex, etc.). But, it is to Mead that the student of the esoteric tradition owes an enormous debt of gratitude. He spent untold hours, deciphering and making sense of some of the most obscure, dismembered, and damaged treatises that the Church Fathers had neglected as previously aforementioned.
I highly recommend this book to the interested reader. This printing by Kessinger LLC, is absolute perfection.
Fragments Of A Faith Forgotten Some Short Sketches Among The Gnostics by G. R. S. Mead, M. A. (originally published in 1900). Kessinger Legacy Reprints 2010.
Love and Peace,
Carlos Romero
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