ABSTRACT
How history is conceived in Gnostic strains of thought is enigmatic. Setting down a narrative order of human events is rarely a key concern of those seeking a deep knowledge of celestial arrangements and the path to the eternally non-contingent. Gnostics’ treatments of what are normally recognizable as historical materials are typically extensions of cosmogonic unfoldings and cosmological outworkings rather than matters of detailed interest and narratological expression for their own sake. The literary and semantic quality of Gnostic approaches to human temporal change, then, almost always enshrouds the past in some mythos or in a cosmically significant, patterned frame in which all ephemerides (the myriad of mere happenings) get bundled and explained within “overarching visions.” This chapter analyzes this general tendency, although it also shows that, over centuries, attention to “received, known history” increases in this trajectory of thought. Despite this slow and special historicizing process, though, the mythic element remains pronounced: it is just that matters of historicity become more addressed and accommodated. Macrohistory, as a heuristic concept, captures the adventurous visioning of the human past as a whole, in god-like panoramic regard or “the mind’s eye,” often including a sense of where humanity is heading (to an imminent End or Transformation, for example, or an “open future,” whether of progress, regress or recurrence) (Trompf 1979a: 71).
