The Gnosis or ancient wisdom in the Christian Scriptures

by William Kingsland

This book is of extraordinary value in unearthing the real Christian message, as understood by the Gospel writers, at a time before the church was turned into an organ of state. It becomes clear that the scriptures are not always to be taken literally as biographies of the life of Christ but that they also contain allegorical and symbolical meaning as well. The figure of Christ that emerges is not so much one of a suffering saviour, pouring out his life blood for the redemption of the world, but rather of a guide to the essential gnosis that the Kingdom of Heaven lies within.

William Kingsland was a professor of Astronomy and a prominent figure in the Theosophical Society in the early years of this century. An original and powerful thinker, he wrote many books concerning Man, Science, Religion and Mysticism. His ideas and concerns were well ahead of their time. In Scientific Idealism, which was published in 1909 he anticipated many of the concerns expressed more recently in such books as The Dancing Wu Lei Masters and The Tao of Physics. His The Great Pyramid in Fact and Theory is a monumental work of esoteric research. The present book, The Gnosis or Ancient Wisdom in the Christian Scriptures was first published posthumously in 1937 under the auspices of the Kingsland Trust. It marked a return to his earlier preoccupation with the essence of Western Mysticism, first evidenced in an earlier book, The esoteric basis of Christianity, that was published in 1895. Writing in the 1930s at the end of a long and productive life, Kingsland could not have anticipated the tremendous archaeological finds of the 1940s at Qumran on the Dead Sea and at Nag Hammadi in Egypt. These finds have added material force to the arguments he puts forward that Christianity, in its essence, has little to do with institutionalised religion but is about individual gnosis, or enlightenment.

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