Logos

[deviadah]

What would a Gnosticism Forum be without a thread on the Logos? Not much... :cool:

Instead of trying to compose an introduction to the Logos concept, or quote some guy with a phd I'll instead bring forth some words by Philip K. Dick, since I think he does a pretty good job at it in a speech called How to Build a Universe That Doesn't Fall Apart Two Days Later, which he delivered in 1978:

Logos was both that which thought, and the thing which it thought: thinker and thought together. The universe, then, is thinker and thought, and since we are part of it, we as humans are, in the final analysis, thoughts of and thinkers of those thoughts.

God help us if the man who translated my novel Ubik into German were to do a translation from the koine Greek into German of the New Testament. He did all right until he got to the sentence “I am the word.” That puzzled him. What can the author mean by that? he must have asked himself, obviously never having come across the Logos doctrine. So he did as good a job of translation as possible. In the German edition, the Absolute Entity which made the suns, made the worlds, created the lives and the places they inhabit, says of itself: I am the brand name. Had he translated the Gospel according to Saint John, I suppose it would have come out as: When all things began, the brand name already was. The brand name dwelt with God, and what God was, the brand name was.

Now I await what frater luciferi have to say about the Logos concept... get to work! :p

[Frater Yechidah]

Excellent topic and quotes, Deviadah :)

Just for those who haven't encountered the word or what it means before, "Logos" is Greek for "Word". Well, it isn't quite that, but that's as close as we can get. In reality, it'd be best for us to just say "I am the Logos" in order to ensure all of the complexities of the word are retained. Dick's thoughts on the mistranslation of Ubik are a perfect example of this.

This is, as far as I'm aware, a Platonic concept that was adopted into Christianity via the Gospel of John (which many argue is extremely Gnostic, and I'm inclined to agree). It's generally used to refer to Christ, the soteric (saving) force of the Christian/Gnostic mythos. It's also often coupled with Sophia, and sometimes it's expressed as the Logos being the conceptual "unmanifest" form in the Fullness, while the Christos is the expression of that force in manifest reality.

I greatly welcome more discussion on this topic.

LLLSHJ,
Yechidah.

[deviadah]

I wonder are there images to symbolize this? If so, and you have them, post some here.

In alchemy there is a symbol for everything, and I think that Logos is such a massive part of Gnosticism that there should be one.

:confused:

[m1thr0s]

I wonder are there images to symbolize this? If so, and you have them, post some here.Well Pythagoras certainly thought so...that's what the Tetractys (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetractys) was called by the Pythagoreans...

Abrahadabra itself is an extension of this so classes in the same category...

http://abrahadabra.com/images/pythagoras01.jpg

link 1: The Tetractys of Pythagoras (http://www.donaldtyson.com/tetract.html)
link 2: Pythagoras of Samos (http://www.mathgym.com.au/history/pythagoras/pythnum.htm)
link 3: (yourdictionary.com) Logos (http://www.yourdictionary.com/logos)

I'll dig out a few more later on that address Logos more directly...

edit: I did a lot of research on this in the past but have never been really good about recording my research. It seemed to me that in its most original usage, the term Logos not only means "Word" but is also synonymous with "Universe" or "God" and was typically used to express the idea of the "Word Manifest" or Universe Manifest" at the level of Word or Symbol. The point is that it never did originally imply any kind of human being at all...rather this type of application was borrowed from its older meaning. So in Christ (as Logos) we have the idea of the Word (of God) Manifest, whereas to the Pythagoreans this would have seemed a vulgar application of the term Logos. To them symbol alone was pure enough to serve in this capacity.

Now some of this is based on etymology while some of it is based on how the term was actually employed. I have yet to see an etymological breakdown that I felt 100% confident of anyway...

m1thr0s

[deviadah]

well Pythagoras certainly thought so...that's what the Tetractys (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetractys) was called by the Pythagoreans...

Thanks for that! :)

You actually gave me an epiphany as certain elements fell into place in my brain. :yinyang:

Aaargh... why does everyone have to use different words for the same things! :o_O:


Edit: Yeah that link (http://www.donaldtyson.com/tetract.html) was nice... the quote there does speak clearly:

"I with pure mind by the number four do swear;
That's holy, and the fountain of nature
Eternal, parent of the mind..." - Agrippa

Logos (http://www.anandgholap.net/Study_In_Consciousness-AB.htm) - from the angle of theosophy
Every LOGOS of a universe repeats this universal SELF -Consciousness: in His Activity, He is the creative Mind, Kriya - corresponding to the universal Sat - the Brahma of the Hindu, the Holy Spirit of the Christian, the Chochmah of the Kabbalist. In His Wisdom, He is the preserving ordering Reason, Jnana - corresponding to the universal Chit - the Vishnu of the Hindu, the Son of the Christian, the Binah of the Kabbalist.

[m1thr0s]

yeah...but Blavatsky was unable to envision symbol itself as the highest form of this embodiment, or at least her writings don't much seem to reflect this. I think that this is an important distinction to come to terms with...that the only incorruptible form this "Universal SELF-Consciousness" can take is symbol itself, best represented in numbers, lines and/or letters. I feel like the Pythagoreans were consciously building on that premise whereas later schools were not...

Even homocentric (anthropocentric) archetypes are tolerable if they can be properly be reduced to first principles but I don't actually know of any examples that achieve this. But by now we are definitely stuck with different notions of what Logos is and how it may manifest. I remain convinced that what appears to be the older standard is still the best...particularly by the time we come round to a modern physics...

m1thr0s

[deviadah]

It's Annie Besant! ;) (same thing I guess)

I do hold your opinion... just thought all angles should be investigated. :cool:

[m1thr0s]

I do hold your opinion... just thought all angels should be investigated. :cool:oh yeah they should...and I also like working with archetypes but there has been a huge tendency to confuse archetypes with principles in western magickal traditions. So long as you are not actually asserting an underscoring principle this is not necessarily a problem, but archetypes are a dime a dozen ultimately...we see this all the time. Pure Alchemical Principles can carry hundreds and thousands of variant archetypes and still retain their mathematical and elemental integrity...this just isn't the case the other way around...

I don't want to get too off on this tangent but just sort of bookmark it and see how it all plays out in a more general investigation of Logos...according to this logic there are all kinds of things that might be rightly considered true emanations of Logos at the level of first principles. The Golden Mean for instance, or Magickal Squares and Sacred Geometries and just all kinds of things that seem to so often get shuffled aside as if they were inessential accessories...

m1thr0s