Clement of Alexandria/ Valentinus of Rome

“Those who lust for power
Disguise in books of Magic
Their covetous intentions   –
Professing how the Spirit is acquired
As if a private plot
An orchard or a garden
Where they go to pick their crop by night
In secrecy and for themselves alone

Egyptian glyphs of serpents radiant
Tails entwined to form the figure eight
Then signify Infinity   –
The labyrinth of dreams
That is where they ply the name
Of metaphysical logic   –
So have freedom to deny
A true corporeal Christ

Gnostic Mystery Traditions
Dispersed in currents of time
Undergo chameleon change of dress
Ever to seem glamorous
To those who are most willingly misled

Who speak of spirit guides yet are unguided
Who replenish in fools’ gold
Their spurious occult systems
Sowing tares of thorn amid the truth

They stand in graves of cryptic knowledge
To say the Son of Man is unrevealed”

 

VALENTINUS OF ROME

Rejected as Bishop of Rome
Valentinus turned to give his own rejection   –

Against sound teachings of the Church
He proposed his own class-system:

He taught there are three kinds of human being:
The spiritual   the psychic   the material

Only his own ‘spiritual’ disciples
Would receive a Gnosis ensuring eternal life

Those of a ‘psychic’ nature   –   mere observant Christians
Would suffer a limited and impermanent heaven

While those ‘material’ Jews and Roman Pagans
Were to be entirely rejected   –   he didn’t quite say how

But his heresy crops up from time to time
In the ‘secret’ ‘hidden’ ‘Gnosis of the Gospels’
The insistence in an ‘Aryan Christ’…
Assorted cults mysteriously endowed
Always seeming to anticipate

A ‘New Age of Enlightenment’
Or the second coming
Of a Third Reich

 

Bernard Saint
Illustration: Claire Palmer

 

 

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