/lit/ - Literature

>>21584824
You know, for all the scorn that's heaped on the term I don't think it's fair. When you look at it as purely descriptive rather than as a label for a specific group of believers in a specific time and place then lots of Hellenic thought is gnostic as is a lot of eastern thought. There's basically only three soteriological systems as far as I'm concerned, dogmatic, praxial and gnostic. I thunk Platonism falls into the gnostic category. Aristotelianism would be more a mixture of praxial and gnostic I think. Abrahamists are clearly dogmatists. Things like Shinto seem praxial I guess as would have been the mundane interpretations of classical Mediterranean polytheism. Anyway, yes I agree specific sects like the Sethians and such are silly but I think gnostic as a term gets a bad wrap. I always just think of it as liberation or salvation through knowledge. I think the different forms of yoga are analogous here and the rishis probably understood this long ago- although they have more forms of yoga.