Launched February 18, 1996, GnosticShock.com (formerly “the Gnostic Friends Network) is one of the oldest continuously maintained gnostic websites on the internet (see archive.org). We transitioned away from the domain enemies.com and relaunched with new branding on February 1, 2016.
Mission Statement
The GnosticShock.com mission is to encourage the individual exploration of the gnostic mythos through unique, entertaining and engaging resources and media. GnosticShock.com is also chartered to do original research on projects that have bearing on one or more aspects of gnosticism or otherwise communicate the good news of gnosis:
- The exploration and mapping of non-ordinary spacetime through illustration, collage and textual cut-ups
- Psychic archaeology and the revelation of a contemporary visual vocabulary for Gnostic myth based on pop culture, advertising and dream imagery
- Research and print media articles examining gnostic myth in terms of “modern” scientific hypotheses (especially those grounded in paradox) and the appropriation of symbol sets from contemporary cosmology, psychology, evolutionary biology, etc.
- Instantiations of the gnostic counter-myth as a creative “mind game” played according to the binary-fractal method proposed by Ioan Culianu
- An examination of Gnosticism as the “shadow side” of Christian theology
- An exploration of Forteana and the unassimilable in Christian heterodoxy
- An escape from the entropic One God Universe of Western monotheism into an “Anything Goes” multiverse of infinite parallel worlds
Core Values
When the site was first launched, we never could have dreamed that gnosticism would penetrate popular consciousness to the extraordinary degree it has, let alone become the dominant motif of seemingly all new Hollywood science fiction films. Twenty years on, gnosticism is perhaps better known than it has been in many hundreds of years, with recent discoveries and trends in academic scholarship (see Miguel Conner’s excellent anthology “Voices of Gnosticism” for an overview) providing many exciting new directions for consideration.
At the same time, we are saddened to find that with the explosion of popular interest in this topic, the field of amateur scholarship has been virtually overrun with an endless parade of cranks, creeps and crass opportunists of the lowest sort – hucksters, shills, and snake-oil salesmen, ethnosupremacist doomsday cults and shameless new age sex gurus (see The Curious Case of John Lash).
Our pledge to you, dear reader, is to remain true to the guiding star of our pleromatic inspiration, steering deftly between the Scylla of sterile, secular skepticism and the Charybdis of crazed and cancerous conspiratology to deliver you material which is thoughtful, humorous and respectful of your intelligence, resisting always the temptation to literalist concretization in favor of whimsical indeterminacy and the magic of experiential metaphor.
SELECTED WORKS
- Fringe Science & the Gnostic Heresies : Article Series (2005 – present)
- Creepy Cartoons (2001-2004)
- Cryptic Collages (1998 – 2000)
- Ouroboros : The Gnostic Webring (1998-2004)
- Wash Your Own Brain : Stickers (1997)
- Yaldabaoth’s Witnesses : Postcard Set (1996)
- Various iterations of the GnosticShock.com website (1996 – present)
SEE ALSO
- Press (1998 – present)
