"Gnosticism gave a new turn by conceiving the planetary constituents of the soul as corruptions of its original nature contracted in its descent through the cosmic spheres. The Christian Arnobius reports this as a Hermetic teaching. ...A very close parallel (in the inverse direction) to the ' account of the soul's ascent. ...[W]hat attaches itself to the soul on its downward journey has the character of substantial though immaterial entities... frequently described as "envelopes" or "garments." Accordingly the resultant terrestrial "soul" is comparable to an onion... on the model of the cosmos... in inverse order: what is outermost there is innermost here, and after the process is completed with incarnation, what is innermost in the spherical scheme of the cosmos, the earth, is as body the outer garment of man. That this body is a fatality to the soul had long ago been preached by the Orphics, whose teaching were revived in the era of Gnosticism. But now the psychical envelopments too are considered impairments and fetters of the transmundane spirit."
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The Gnostic Religion
The Gnostic Religion:The Message of the Alien God and the Beginning of Christianity (1958) by , differs in scope, organization, and literary intention, but includes much of the information contained in his Gnosis und späntantiker Geist: Die mythologische Gnosis, the first volume of which was published in 1934. An enlarged edition of The Gnostic Religion was published in 1963 with an additional essay, and supplemented to include his research on the , discovered in 1945. This book, particularly th
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