ABSTRACT

The proposition that tribal or smaller-scale traditional societies yield Gnostic ideas may seem absurd, especially considering the kind of elaborate speculations post-War scholars have discussed since the Nag Hammadi finds. Such societies, for long deemed “primitive,” more recently “primal,” are supposed to be pre-reflective in the “archaeology of mental dictionaries” and thus not possess a plethora of abstract ideas – about aeons and emanations, or philosophic truth and deep knowledge – in their conceptual repertories. However, if we set aside the long-prevailing (though not heuristically useless) assumption that the thousands of smaller culturo-linguistic traditions documented through history do not necessarily constitute the residual “childhood of the human race,” possibilities for a matchup can look promising. The “Gnostic World,” as we have been filling it out cross-culturally in this volume, for example, often includes the transmission of secret disclosures and insights, and this commonly occurs with small-scale traditional societies’ initiation rites. Sometimes this can include revelation about the nature of spirit beings, while at other times (usually many more others) what is passed down is about managing in a difficult world. With over 7,000 traditional societies somehow surviving today, we can only provide samples of relevant evidence, most of it from the Australo-Pacific region, where traditions of almost a third of the small-fry among world religions persist. En route points will be raised about the implications of our findings for the study of Gnostic traditions in the history of religions.