Gnostic Horror and the Fall into History

Modernity began with the disinterest and apathy of cosmic horror—but the 21st century has led us somewhere far darker.

by Kay Halloran

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“Now consider the possibility that we’ve always had a disembodied alien lifeform living among us. Invisible yet able to occupy minds and alter them. It hides in plain sight, everywhere. This mind boasts of its own omnipotence… it informs us that we are no more than– than submissive instruments of its will. Then deliberately wills us to defy its rules? All the while, it vows to punish every pre-ordained breach of those rules, however brief or minor—with eternal, agonizing torture in a cosmic concentration camp. What name might we give such an omnipresent evil?“

“God. You’re talking about God.”

— Grant Morrison, Nameless

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One of the most crucial ingredients of cosmic horror, one which goes all the way back to Lovecraft’s own reflections about his thematic repertoire, is indifference—the awful notion that the overwhelming and unknowable forces of the cosmos look upon all human values and ambitions with pure, undiluted apathy.

Ever the atheist materialist, Lovecraft viewed the affairs of culture and society as a sort of psychological coping mechanism: a set of behaviors that existed primarily to manage and hopefully reduce the existential anxiety of being alive in a universe which was, in fact, alien and largely unaccommodating to human life or understanding.

What a merciful notion, that the horrors that will snuff out your existence will be indifferent to you! That dread Cthulhu—rising from up from his abyssal city and flooding the earth in a tsunami of death and madness—might be as oblivious to your life and suffering as a toddler in the bath, splashing over the edge of the tub! The reality, unfortunately, is much worse.

It’s undeniable that cosmic horror perfectly embodied the 20th Century’s bleak outlook of existentialist materialism — and yet the sheer terror of the present moment no longer feels like some disinterested cataclysm, as it may once have. Instead, it has become an intricate and byzantine prison, one intentionally designed to entrap the mind and destroy he spirit.

We live now under the weight of a declining empire riddled with plague and instability, captives to the imposition of historical circumstance. In another era, this might feel like happenstance or misfortune. Instead, there’s a looming sense that everything awful about our lives right now feels manufactured by design: we live during an unprecedented escalation of inequality and a lowering of living standards, a situation in which the influence of technology and gig labor has captured us into a routine of mechanized alienation, both from one another and from our own humanity.

What a merciful notion, that the horrors that will snuff out your existence will be indifferent to you!  

In all of world history there has never been a single civilization that managed to consciously avert an oncoming environmental collapse. Our unique tragedy is that we are the first to know and anticipate it—and still do nothing about it. If history ended in the Nineties, it has returned, and it’s hard not to take it personally, hard not to feel as though being alive right now is a curse, a sick joke played by the forces of space-time.

These anxieties—this sensation of living as the powerless subject of an empire in a brutal time of meaningless suffering—are not unique to us. They were also felt 2000 years ago by one of the earliest Christian sects: the Gnostics.

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“I once knew a man who claimed that, overnight, all the solid shapes of existence had been replaced by cheap substitutes. Trees made of poster board. Houses built of colored foam. Whole landscapes composed of hair clippings. His own flesh, he said, was now just so much putty.”

— Thomas Ligotti, The Mystics of Muelenburg

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Although they were an explicitly religious movement, the central thrust of gnosticism is best understood as a response to the contemporary platonic cosmology of its day. While pagan neoplatonist philosophers like Plotinus and Porphyry espoused that the deficiency of material life—the way in which it pales before the supposed spiritual perfection of the forms—was a matter of distance and error generated out of matter’s individuated alienation from perfect oneness, the Gnostics held that the material world itself was actively evil, somehow corrupted from a spiritual essence.

The early Gnostics drew heavy influence from the mystical Judaism of their day and reapproached the tanakh with a more radical eye. In the God of Abraham, they identified an undeniably petty and sadistic streak, one that was fundamentally incompatible with the idea of a loving deity; instead, they reconceived the creator of Genesis not as a benevolent and monotheistic god, but rather as a wicked and deficient demon who they referred to as “The Demiurge” or “Ialdabaoth”, a fallen being that had created the material universe to rule over as a flawed prison of suffering to bind souls.

Rather than an escape from sin, gnosticism’s goal became the liberation of the soul from the dungeon of the material world. 

With the demiurge came a vast pantheon of angels and demonic “archons”, beings that populated a complex and subversive mythology of biblical apocrypha. Astrology, now a resurgent social fad, was also an anxiety strongly associated with this kind of anti-material, deterministic worldview. This late antique belief—that the indifferent cycles of the heavenly spheres shackle and drag the fate of men like the moon churning the tides—could even be considered the archetypal expression of cosmicism.

But gnostic Christianity was not without its own concept of salvation—rather than an escape from sin, its goal became the soul’s escape from the dungeon of the material world through esoteric knowledge (the “gnosis” from which the movement derives its name) and through ascetic practices like self-isolation, physical ordeals, and anti-natalism. Somewhere deep beneath this counterfeit reality, the Gnostics thought, there must still exist an all-loving and complete god, and from this god emanated forth the aeons: incarnations of the true loving god into our world penitentiary, sent to impart the secrets of the soul’s emancipation. The aeons were identified both as religious prophets, such as Jesus Christ and John the Baptist, and as mythological figures like Sophia, the goddess of wisdom.

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“I’ve seen things. I’ve seen gods. Demons. Angels… The dead and the damned, most of us are damned, you know?”

“Does it scare you?”

“It all scares me… The point is to know. To fucking know. And to see the architecture and the levers to climb the mountain!”

— A Dark Song (2017), dir. Liam Gavin

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While the particular inhabitants of Gnosticism’s cosmology remain largely absent from modern fiction, its themes have been meaningfully explored by a number of significant works. Notable examples include Philip K. Dick’s VALIS trilogy in science-fiction and Clive Barker’s Imajica in fantasy, although there is rarely much consistency in how different stories and authors approach the elements of its cosmology. (Works of horror in the gnostic subgenre, for instance, are more likely to emphasize its dystheistic and paranoid elements rather than gnosticism’s fascination with subversive mythology and esoteric revelation.)

Another example of the Gnostic intruding into modern fiction is David Lynch’s 2017 return to Twin Peaks, which centers itself thematically around the ravages of time and aging, a concept it explores by returning to the same characters and locations of the original series after a 25 year hiatus. Lynch was wise to emphasize the power of Chronos, the only old god capitalism has failed to bind under its yoke—the passage of time in the world of Twin Peaks provides a sly comment upon the original series’ saccharine nostalgia for Americana. It’s difficult not to see the world The Return presents as one that is both crueler and more cynical than its predecessor. For budding students of gnosis, the completed mythology of Twin Peaks has much to offer: manufactured realities, conspiracies of evil entities behind the forces of the material world, and a perfect example of a gnostic aeon in the form of Laura Palmer, a being incarnated as a martyr for the purpose of spiritual salvation.

In the realm of fantasy, we might also turn to Kentaro Miura’s long-running medieval fantasy-horror manga Berserk, which notably begins with virtually no supernatural elements. The world of Berserk is unrelentingly violent, cruel, and exploitative, and while it is filled with unambiguously evil people, it appears to be more or less business as usual for human society. Eventually, though, the curtains are drawn back, and the four “guardian angels” of the Godhand—extra-dimensional demonic overlords, their appearance inspired by the cenobites of Barker’s Hellraiser—emerge to enact their once-in-200-years ceremony. The god of the Berserk universe reveals itself as a deity called “The Idea of Evil”, a psychic consciousness that manifested from humanity’s collective desire to explain the absurdity of its own suffering, revealing that the entire history of the world has been orchestrated to serve its own devices. After being maimed and traumatized by his encounter with this sinister divine, Berserk’s hero, Guts, sets off on a warpath of revenge against the cosmos. This sense of futile desperation is the formula for the best emotional moments of the series.

Gnostic dystheism also lends itself well to horror stories that seek to highlight the more abhorrent aspects of Christian religion. 2001’s Frailty, directed by the late Bill Paxton, explores the reactionary fantasy of a god-chosen vigilante, then proceeds to drive such a concept to its most terrifying logical and moral extreme. The 2017 occult horror film A Dark Song, on the other hand, tells a story about grief as its two protagonists toil to complete an infamously severe months-long ritual of sanctification under the weight of a divine force that is eager both to deceive their sense of reality and to punish their slightest mistakes.

Thomas Ligotti, now a paradigmatic figure in the cosmic horror genre, flirts openly with gnostic concepts in a number of his stories. Ligotti’s “Nethescurial” surrounds an idol that was once worshiped in antiquity as a pantheistic deity. Its followers came to recognize that its cosmic influence was that of a fundamentally evil ‘demiurge’, and eventually suppressed its ‘pandemonic’ cult. In “The Mystics of Muelenburg”, an occult seeker eager to attain insight into the true nature of reality hears an account of the doom of Muelenburg, a medieval town swallowed up in a nightmarish yet unintelligible shifting of its inhabitants’ reality. In Ligotti’s corporate horror stories like “The Town Manager” and “Our Temporary Supervisor”, the line is blurred between the panopticon of mundane corporate administration and a more opaque and insidious cosmic force that pulls the strings.

Grant Morrison’s 2016 comic Nameless is perhaps the most explicit treatment of the gnostic anxiety within the cosmic horror genre yet written. The story begins as the titular “nameless” occultist is recruited by a cabal of billionaire futurists for a space mission to divert the comet Xibalba as it hurtles towards the earth. Yet nothing is as it seems, and through the nauseating unfurling of its non-linear narrative, the cosmic becomes the personal and results in a psychedelic horror that reads like an even more surreal, esoteric, and depraved thematic escalation of 1997’s Event Horizon.

And yet even as the gnostic has only begun to make its presence known through our fiction, it is undeniable that we have arrived in its era. The discrepancy between the American Dream and the American Reality is so wide that any consensus reality has collapsed, and conspiracies and myths are necessary just to square the circle.

This is exactly the fertile ground that gnostic thought needs to return anew. As material circumstances deteriorate amidst a fragmenting landscape of scams and cults, new genuine expressions of spirituality will emerge—and many will turn inward. They will blot out the contradictions in a complex mythology, and strain to listen for the secret transmissions from a perfect world.