Not In His Image by John Lamb Lash

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

reviewed by Joseph Szimhart, 2018 January

This radical vision of ancient Gnosticism for modern times was written by an intriguing acquaintance I once knew during my days in Santa Fe, NM, John Lamb Lash (I lived in Santa Fe from 1975 until the end of 1992). John Lash released his book through Chelsea Green Publishing in 2006. I first read it in 2007 or a decade ago.

Lash’s book, according to some effusive endorsements, “… is a must for everybody who is trying to understand the psychospiritual currents underlying the present global crisis” (Stanislav Grof, author of The Holotropic Mind); “… is a blessing, and a warning that we must cease taking the terrible advice of Christianity…and that we must instead re-inhabit our own joyful, painful, mortal, beautiful bodies and fight for our lives and for the lives of those we love. This book points the way home” (Derrick Jensen who wrote the afterword); and “Sometimes a book changes the world. Not In His Image is such a book” (Roger Payne, Ph.D., president of Ocean Alliance, author Among Whales).

Stanislav Grof, Roger Payne, and Derrick Jensen are names that tell me something already. We are either moving to cutting edge or to lunatic fringe territory. The choice is yours.

Lash has the moxie to relish such praise. One of his websites, https://www.metahistory.org/siteauthor.php, touted him as:

John Lash (b. 1945, New York City) has been called the true successor of Mircea Eliade and the rightful heir of Joseph Campbell. Unlike those two world-class academics, John is a self-educated free-lance scholar who combines studies and experimental mysticism to teach directive mythology: that is, the application of myth to life, rather than its mere interpretation.

I have no idea who "called" John Lash “the true successor of Mircea Eliade,” but he clearly likes the honorific. I doubt that Eliade would concur—Eliade (1907-1986), after all, continued to attend a Christian Orthodox Church well into his old age, something that might nauseate the man who wrote Not In His Image. Joseph Campbell, on the other hand, when he was in one of his states of new-age-yogic-bliss, might have lent Lash some credence. But this is pure speculation on my part.

NB: I employ Ad Hominem comments in next two paragraphs.

As I recall personally through our conversations and experiencing his lectures, research, and ideas, John could be quite compelling to less astute scholars and naïve seekers. A man blessed with handsome looks and a smooth speaking style, he especially had a way with women I met who would support his endeavors. Charisma relies on relationship—it is not an innate trait (see Max Weber)—thus, only those who admired Lash’s oeuvre found him charismatic. Lash surrounded his ideological impulses with an enormous wealth of juicy if insightful facts seemingly linked within the impenetrable depth of his personal gnosis.

In this book, he views himself among ancient shamans who tapped the truth of our existence, but more so as a "mystic historian." Sparked somewhat by his interest in and devotion to Rudolf Steiner, Lash pursued the “supersensible worlds” that Steiner claimed to be in touch with, but in his own way. Lash by choice is an independent scholar with no formal academic chops. William Blake’s oft-quoted outsider slogan, I must create my own system or be enslaved by another man’s, fits Lash’s approach to wisdom and what he calls “meta-history” or a metaphysical approach to myth throughout history.

At the core of his world-view is an array of obtuse hypotheses—we will examine a couple of these. Yes, obtuse means thickheaded or dull-witted. I find none of his hypotheses or cosmic claims compelling. Let me cut to the ad hominem chase: The last time I heard Lash speak was at a poetry reading in Santa Fe around or before 1990. My wife, Becky, came along to this small gathering. Becky came away with a distinct aversion to John. His coy sense of self-importance to humanity’s place in the universe is what I call cosmic narcissism, a trait not uncommon among controversial gurus, preachers, astrologers, neo-shamans, life-coaches, and prophets: The universe is or might be speaking through me to you.

Narcissism as a trait moves us to create a grand theater or narrative that places the self on center stage. It is like an embellished CV. When excessive, our staged reality becomes a shield or a mask that can lead to a self-sealing social and ideological system, or in extreme cases, a tangled web of lies. The theater separates those who are accepted (pneumatics or Gnostics) into the theater from those who are not (the ignorant or hylics [mud-people]). As the mask remains, the actor feels at ease in his performance. Try to remove the mask or reveal the insecure or possibly deceiving self under it, and the narcissist will bite. The true actor sans mask merely bows after the play ends. The play never ends for the career narcissist whose play on a small stage is their reality and not the "All the world's a stage" that Shakespeare proposed from his stage.

This is not a diagnosis nor a condemnation, but a recognition of traits that may vary under different social conditions. Narcissim can flow within acts of kindness as well as from intent to manipulate. 

In guru-land, we find what I call the cosmic narcissists and their cults. Cult, properly understood, is not pejorative—cult is a devotional system or devotional activity directed toward a person, object, or idea. Defining a cult or any person or group as deceptive, malignant, or ridiculous demands far more than merely slapping a label on a group or devotional act. Lash, in line with some Gnostic writings and with Blavatsky-inspired Theosophy (The Secret Doctrine), slaps that label, “cult,” pejoratively on an ancient sect of Jews that produced the Torah and the great Temple (Listen to: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jwXU5hVaNKs&feature=player_embedded#t=0. I will be referring to this podcast interview with Lash as we proceed).

The guru’s manipulative behavior and grandiose personality traits aside, I am more interested here in the bait—namely, in the transcendent attraction in the teaching. Lash’s grand scheme in Not In His Image is this:

Ancient Gnostic texts unearthed in Nag Hammadi in the late 1940s provide obscure but true templates that reveal what modern science and cosmology are only just now realizing. Lash is the mystic historian who teases out the truth for us. The Gnostic pleroma or pure realm of divine Light is precisely in the core of luminescence at the hub of our Milky Way galaxy. The Aeons or serpentine god-energies inside the pleroma go about playing with energy (plasma), creating stuff that manifests in matter and energy (MEST-matter, energy, space, time) throughout the arms of the galaxy.

The Aeons, in Lash’s view, are Deistic or gods that set things in motion and then let the experiments play out as they will. However, based on the Sophia myth or narrative from a Gnostic text, Lash spots an “anomaly” (not a mistake) in one of the arms of the galaxy. In that galactic arm, we have our solar system and our Earth. The adventurous, serpentine Aeon Sophia (wisdom) became so enthralled with her experiment on Earth that she became identified with it, much to the horror of the Aeons. Sophia is Gaia, and is trapped, so to speak, in matter. In Gnostic myth, the Aeons, out of need to fix the flaw, release the “Christ” spirit or “Mesotes” (312) that becomes or mediates, in Lash-speak, “Sophia Dreaming” to help inspire us to know this secret and behave accordingly.

“Gnostics taught that the sentience of the earth is an expression of Sophia’s Dreaming. Sophia dreams us out of cosmic plentitude, from the heart of the Pleroma. The Optimal future for mankind is to reciprocate, dreaming Sophia.” (Lash, 336)  

Another aspect of Aeonic play created Archons that are identified in Gnostic systems as the planets, sun, and moon that roam our heavens and influence our behavior (with Gnostic teaching in mind, Lash created a form of astrology called “Terrestrology”). In Manichaeism, planetary gods are “evil” or noxious influences that we need to understand to overcome. They test or initiate us on our journey back to the pleroma or Light. In Lash’s system, Archontic beings manifest as insect-like entities that “live” on rocky, non-life (no oxygen, as O2 is toxic to Archon insects) planets and asteroids. However, due to the anomaly on Earth and Sophia’s entrapment, these Archons can and do insert bad ideas into our minds. This is the cosmic mind-control game that Lash is most concerned about, the one that we must come to grips with if our species is to survive. And Lash is the prime source of this profound, salvatory insight.

His gnosis (insight) into Sophia-Gaia is the radical redeemer, not the bozo Jesus of the fundamentalist knuckleheads who call themselves Christian, thus the title of his book. And certainly, redemption is not the Jewish faith that spawned the three worst, evil religions on Earth. Our lot as awakened, knowing selves is to make every effort to commune with Sophia (Gaia) and remain “in” her to avoid the Archontic delusions. We do this by returning to ancient shamanic practices with Mother Nature to become a “nature mystic” (336 in his book) like Lash claims to be—a neo-Pagan. 

Okay—take a breath. I do not have time to unpack all of this here, nor is it necessary.

How do we return to ancient Gnostic or shamanic practices to save ourselves from the mean insectoid Archons? Well, if you are an intimate follower of a guru-shaman, you listen to what the shaman directs you to do! Easy. For example, Carlos Castaneda and his Yaqui Way of Knowledge fiction books appeared to guide by proxy through the protagonist author how to pursue this knowledge. Lash on many occasions refers to Castaneda as if the trickster-author were truly onto something with his “nagual” idea. Hippie seekers in droves read Castaneda and believed that he was writing about a real shaman sorcerer, and if he was not, it did not matter because all of it was a “higher” truth disguised by the myth. Only the enlightened could see the clothes on the naked Nagual Emperor. Lash, I believe, is in that latter category, the one that relishes Plato’s concept of the pious fraud that is necessary (in the polis) to both keep people in line with the rule of law and to trick them into pursuing hidden truth. After all, the Archons’ mind-control can only be bypassed with subterfuge. To help a student bypass the "machine" as Gurdjieff described the conditioned robotic behavior of human beings, one must be the trickster using skillful means to awaken the dull wits of a student. Gurdjieff employed psychological shock tactics that Castaneda's don Juan appeared to borrow or mimic.  

Lash published “The Miranda Rule from the Nagual” under his metahistory.org site:

“You have a right to be silent when questioned. Anything you say or do not say can be used to expose your pretences [sic], or demask your pretending, or dissolve your denial.

You have a right to consult a guardian spirit before speaking to the Nagual.

If you do not have acquaintance with such a guardian spirit, one will be appointed for you by the Nagual.

If, from this moment on, you choose freely to engage in dialogue with the Nagual, your sense of personal reality can, and most certainly will, be permanently altered.

Reading and understanding these rights, do you now consent to interact with the Nagual?”

This "rule" Lash presents to the general student-reader of his tomes and to his personal students. It is the ultimate guru-submission statement cleverly Mirandaized, just as author Castaneda submitted to his Nagual mentor don Juan Matus (not a real person or actual Yaqui shaman). As Castaneda was running out of critical favor with his drug-induced (entheogen) adventures by his third book, he formed and managed a small, secret cult of students around his nagual-man persona to produce more book material. In effect, Carlos owned and manipulated don Juan. How would I know? Exposes had been written, but for three days, I interviewed one well-educated young man from Columbia who was in Castaneda’s immediate circle for two years. He described Castaneda’s experiments formulating the Tensegrity movements (magical passes) that were trademarked years later.

Tensegrity became the technique sold in workshops (www.cleargreen.com/) that gave devotees the illusion that they could DO something to tap and awaken gnosis powers within. Tensegrity was a means to clear and focus the “assemblage point” that Castaneda talked about—the Monad of the true being that you are. The author Carlos formed his narratives in best-selling books by repurposing activities and reactions he observed among his cult following on “sorcery” outings, often in Southwest and Mexican desert settings. In these schemes with guardian spirits, Nagual gnosis, and Self-remembering (Lash, Castaneda, or Gurdjieff) we enter one bag of pious fraud in which the student’s mind and emotions get shook up for purported ego cleansings to allow the Nagual, gnosis, or Sophia to flourish.

I do not buy Lash's idea of insectoid implants from Archons as real or metaphoric. To get someone to believe that is a 'shared delusion,' a folie a deux. I regularly encounter patients with schizophrenia that come into the psych hospital where I work who have alien “implants” or phobias about government mind control. Patients sharing a guru's delusional thinking are rare, primarily because "sharing" ideas in religion or among conspiracy buffs is normal and endemic to human function. The question is, when does folie a deux become harmful or debilitating? 

How does Lash prove that the Archon effect as insect creation is real? Lash claimed that he alone discovered and introduced the unique Archon concept in 2003. Others have taken up his Archon conspiracy narrative. He turned to a 19th century story about a real amateur scientist, Andrew Crosse, who reported in 1837 that he produced tiny insects (arcari) from electrically charged rocks, a process called abiogenesis. Reproducing Crosse’s experiment proved tentative if not impossible. Perhaps Crosse energized crystals or a foreign organism, some speculated, but did he unleash autonomous “acari” that somehow thrived after the experiment—we have no proof.  I quote from a friendly account:

“What we know: The precise details required to conduct the experiment are not clear… today…. Time has blurred the exact method, hence we may never know the how and why the creatures were created or if they indeed were created. But could it be possible that Crosse stumbled across the primordial soup that evolutionist(s) theorize was needed to create the world’s first life form…”  http://www.spartechsoftware.com/dimensions/mystical/andrewcroise.htm

“Could it be possible” is the kind of question that the History Channel’s specious series on “Ancient Aliens” on cable TV asks to tease naïve viewers into speculation and continued interest in the next segment—a truly leading question.

Could it be possible that Lash discovered in Crosse’s experiment evidence of the insect creation led by the Archontic “Dracona?” He as much as claims this is a key event that should not be ignored—could it be possible?

So, Lash claims that ancient insect-like Archons “implanted” into the brains of an ancient Hebrew Zadikim cult the beliefs in a jealous Patriarchal creator-deity (demiurge) that has derailed and trapped modern human consciousness. We are in the Zadikim “matrix.” It is that religion or cult that has proceeded, mainly through Christianity, to eradicate indigenous peoples who are most closely aligned with the natural Sophia spirit of earth. With that, Lash easily falls within the New Age milieu of conspiracy wonks who see “Patriarchal” humanity under Archon-like mind-control, raping the earth (Sophia) for all the pleasure they can gain and killing “her” in the process.

Lash: “…there is a nasty twist to the cosmic plot. Due to anomalous conditions impacting the experiment, namely, the intrusion of the archontic mind parasites, we are challenged to detect and overcome an alien factor working in our own minds. This alien factor is a compound tendency to deceive, fake, hoax, conceal, lie, avoid, prevaricate, and pretend, that frustrates the natural talent of our species, our ingenious, open-ended learning capacities.” http://realitysandwich.com/112198/wisdoms_dare_future_divine_experiment/

Lash: "If we cannot yet [italics in context] communicate telepathically, one to another, this is only because we lack the skill to deliberately receive and transmit the subvocal language of our thinking. But what if Gaia, who equpiied us with our communicating faculties, can already exhibit telepathic abilities that we may only evolve in the future? That being so, she could talk to us in any language on earth without needing a mouth and tongue. According to the testimony of native peoples who use psychoactive plants to access the Gaian mind, this is exactly what she does." (336)

There is that Ancient Aliens TV show "what if" again, and the leading suggestion of "yet." And what "exactly" does "she" talk about through the effects of psychoactive plants? Lash says nothing. We must assume he knows that the ancient shamans using mushrooms or mescaline communed with cosmic reality. But here we run into a series of problems that go beyond language. Reports from the "nagual" on mushrooms is idiosyncratic and often culturally if not personally grounded, much like Lash's thesis in this book. Psychoactive plants or entheogens are fickle teachers and reveal no consistent system of reality. Some experiences make people crazy. (Cleansing the Doors of Perception: The Religious Significance of Entheogenic Plants and Chemicals by Huston Smith, 2000)  

If Lash's book sounds like The Book of Urantia or L Ron Hubbardism re-versioned, you are on track, but do not think he needed Scientology or that he borrowed directly from Hubbard in any way. Hubbard like Lash tapped Theosophical teachings and regurgitated occult ideas that modern science, psychology, and history began pushing into the fringes of western education with a vengeance by the 18th Century.  Gnosis as a way of wisdom got marginalized even more than in the past while faith and reason became foes of each other. The Three Graces of cognition, Faith, Reason, and Gnosis, have fallen into disarray.

I mentioned above that I have been working on a paper that examines cognition in human evolution and that the categories of cognition are gnosis faith and reason. The model was proposed by Wouter Hanegraaff (2010) in Clashes of Knowledge: Orthodoxies and Heterodoxies in Science and Religion. Hanegraaff’s Chapter 7 essay, “Reason, Faith, and Gnosis: Potentials and Problematics of Typological Construct” intrigues me. Citing Gilles Quispel (1916-2006), Hanegraaff notes that gnosis has been regarded as the quirky sister in the cognitive trio of siblings with faith and reason. But Hanegraaf does not fall into a neo-Gnostic apologetic and the New Age camps that Quispel fell into. There are not three separate or hierarchical realms in cognition: faith, reason and gnosis are aspects of every one’s way of knowing. To pit gnosis against faith and/or reason or faith against reason the way that neo-Gnostics and Atheists do, is to decorticate oneself.

The ancient Christians in Rome (in the 2nd and 3rd Centuries) knew this when examining all the emerging texts and teachings surrounding the Christ event. When Bishop Irenaeus wrote “Against the Heresies” around A.D. 175 to 185 (cited by Lash several times), he was part of an early movement to fine tune the teachings of Jesus represented by dozens of factions, many at complete odds. This included the pneumatic Christians, now-called Gnostics, who were a diverse lot with only one common theme: Inner knowing of truth was a special trait of the few and not the many who could not grasp the intent of the new and revealed myths. Beyond that, there was vast disagreement among the early Gnostic sects. Calling oneself a Gnostic is like calling oneself a cloud or a chakra. Variations are infinite. Specifiers are needed.

The early Roman Christians soon determined that the teaching of Jesus Christ was not an elitist scheme for special people, that it had no secrets, and that it could be shouted from the rooftops. The gnosis or Cosmic Christ element was revealed fully in the Gospel of John and in some of the writings of Paul. As Professor David Brakke (2015) explained in his lecture series Gnosticism: From Nag Hammadi to the Gospel of Judas, church fathers Clement of Alexandria and Origen presented sophisticated versions of Christian gnosis to counter the attraction of Valentinian Christian gnosis that was popular among the educated elites. The point here is that this way of cognition (gnosis) was never discarded by the Christian Church. The opposite became true when certain sects and teachers hijacked the Christ event for their own elite purposes and revelations. More recently, Joseph Smith applied his gnosis to hijack Christian teaching into his Book of Mormon myth. 

Or, another way of seeing this is that primitive Roman Christianity was already taut with mysterious teachings—why add to the confusion?    

Gnosis for Christians is this (see the Gospel of John 6:56): God eats (absorbs) us, sins and all, as we eat God to stay alive. When we choose not to nurture and eat the free gifts of God (when we sin), we will suffer the eternal consequences, unless we return to eat of God. The less we “know” we are God, and the better we behave, the better off we will be. Yes, according to many cosmic myths, God or Brahman "eats," much like everything in the universe appears to be swallowed up in black holes in due time.

The ancient Jewish Temple was a place of holocaust, a machine for the sacrifice of animals to feed a God totally emptied and always hungry to eat all of God’s creation. Think ouroboros. Ancient Jews fed that God to keep from getting eaten, thus the mystery event of Abr[ah]am, Isaac, and the sacrificial substitute of a Ram or lamb. Issac was to be food for God. The animal substitute was the Abraham correction to people sacrifice, one that the Aztecs, for example, never learned before the Spanish onslaught. The Christ correction to animal sacrifice revealed the eternal cosmic reality in a new way and did away with the Temple machine of animal sacrifice and the priesthood that got wealthy from it. “Take and eat (cheap blessed bread and common blessed wine will do): This is My Body. It is given up for you…” And, “take up your cross and follow Me.”

For some reason Lash does not accept or grasp this version of Christian gnosis. I suspect he rails against the fundamentalist, Millerite-Advent version that impacted his youth growing up in a small town in Maine. Nietzsche blew him out of the Christian folk-religion box at age seventeen: “I swore to finish what Nietzsche had begun. I vowed to think through and live out his critique of Christianity to the end” (x in his book intro). Nietzsche may have blown him out of Adventist waters, but Lash landed in Rudolf Steiner’s supersensible arms. The rest, as they say, is meta-history. 

However, Nietzsche was no fool to think that just anyone could be worthy of following the radical path he valued. Even he saw that he was merely a way shower, a kind of John the Baptist for his Superman (Übermensch), his Godot.* Nietzsche did not demand that people cast off good Christian values. He warned the fool that dares walk his road less travelled: “For there are many that cast away their final value when they cast away their chains.” (Thus Spake Zarathustra)

Before Abraham, Moses, and the Archontic implants into the Hebrew brain, there was Noah and his floating zoo, a myth for the ages. Noah’s paternalistic deity saved only him and his family from a raging flood that destroyed “the world.” As the waters subsided, the deity produced the rainbow as a sign for the covenant with Noah that “He” would not destroy “the world” again. According to this myth, Noah’s family is the genetic reboot for the entire human race. No one reasonable with any grasp of why this Noah story was made up believes that rainbows did not exist before Noah saw one, or before the advent of the humanoid ape species we call Homo sapiens. No one can properly study human genetics based on a family that landed a boat on Mt. Ararat. Tiny African bushmen are closer to the origin of our genetic stream. But beliefs are strange things that may or may not have value. False beliefs have proven to have value—think placebos.

Here is where Lash fails to grasp the power and proper use of myth. Like the common occultist (Steiner, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi) since the 19th Century, Lash wants to outmaneuver standard science by invoking physical sciences to shore up his myth about the Archon implant. He suspects the sciences will prove his hypotheses. Gnostic myth is compatible with astronomy, he says in an interview. His “glosses” in brackets on page 180 inserted in a quote from the Gnostic text “Hypostasis of the Archons,” attempt to force (violate) the text’s purposely poetic nature with references to prosaic reality: “A veil exists between the world above [in the galactic core], and the realms that are below [exterior, in the galactic limbs] …” Also, note his references to the Crosse experiment above and the way our galaxy operates astronomically. 

Castaneda’s stories work well enough as fiction, but he lied about his sources to try to make his fiction work as a science, as “anthropology,” as real events based on a real Yaqui sorcerer—a clever way to sell more books: Bigfoot is real—I have a picture of a footprint and my sister ate lunch with him. My sister is signing pictures of the footprint for $10 each at Barnes & Noble next Sunday. Blavatsky’s myth of the Masters helped to create a cult following that believed her Masters were real contacts with flesh lives who could demonstrate telepathy. The Maharishi sold more mantras through his TM cult because he claimed that modern science “proved” that someone could levitate once they achieved “brainwave coherence” with the TM technique. And so on. Cult followers are more intrigued with guru claims when the sciences are invoked.   

My contention is that cults and the belief systems that bind them (religion) have driven human social evolution. Faith cannot be avoided if we are to function well. Cults like beliefs can have good and bad effects with a wide range of manifestations. It depends partly on how well and ethically the cognitive tools we have of gnosis, faith, and reason flow in the human social matrix—the cult. But emphasizing gnosis as somehow superior and separate from faith or reason risks abandoning gnosis to diseased, guru-centered revelations that share with no wider wisdom or earthly value. That is the danger of creating your own system or being enslaved by another man’s. That is the danger of any self-centered gnosis and system.

Among the grand schemes that explain the human condition, Hegel’s has been ranked among the most profound, a fact that Kierkegaard appreciated yet described as “merely comic” if taken seriously. Kierkegaard saw that existential man (as a Christian) is forever fallible (original sin; man assuming a cosmic role as "judge"), and had no ability to grasp religious reality as it is or objectively. Kierkegaard with Nietzsche after him, dismissed this grandiose if pedestrian tendency in church preachers to pretend they “know” what the Gospel said for everyone. We might approach objectivity in certain physical sciences, but in social, political and religious realms we tend toward subjectivity. Nevertheless, our existential lot is to choose a path or make one up. We must choose, said Kiekegaard. How well we do that is the problem. In reading Lash’s book existentially, the reader must choose how or why to appreciate its value.  

Not In His Image was very interesting reading with fascinating ideas that explain our human condition, but I choose not to take those ideas seriously.

• reference to Waiting for Godot, an absurdist play written by Samuel Beckett (composed in French between 1948-1949)

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