JOHN LAMB LASH
Comparative mythologist, author and teacher John Lamb Lash is one of the foremost exponents of the power of myth to direct and shape an individual’s life, as well as history itself. Robert Sardello, co-founder of the Dallas Institute of Arts and Humanities, called John “the true successor of Mircea Eliade.” Others compare him to Joseph Campbell, whose trailblazing work on Parzival and the Grail Quest has been extended by John. He is a lifelong student of world mythology, Tantra, Buddhism, Gnosticism, the pre-Christian Mysteries, alchemy, astrology, and naked-eye astronomy.
His latest book, Not in His Image (2006), a manifesto of the goddess revival, is fast becoming an underground classic. It introduces the concept of Gaian experimental mysticism, or telestic shamanism, as a recovery of the pagan Mysteries. In a full-page review in the Sunday L. A. Times, Jonathan Kirsch compared it to The White Goddess of Robert Graves. He also compares John Lash to Nietzsche for the strength of his radical critique of salvationist faith.
John has traveled widely throughout the world and lived in Japan, the UK, Greece, Norway, France, Spain and Belgium. (http://metahistory.org/siteauthor.php)
www.Nemeta.org – Sophianic School of Arts and Sciences
Nemeta, “the sacred groves,” is the online portal to a range of experimental learning paths based on the legacy of mythologist and visionary teacher John Lamb Lash. Organized thematically as the School of Sophianic Arts and Sciences, it offers a rich and diverse array of material for “adult education,” customized to meet the challenges of Kali Yuga. Drawing upon the lineage of the Mystery Schools, Nemeta presents Gnosis in a novel iteration, grounded in the sacred narrative of the wisdom goddess Sophia, the plenary sovereign intelligence of the living earth.
www.SophianicMyth.org – Discover The Home Story, The Fallen Goddess Scenario 1.5
Metahistory.org charts a passage beyond the received scripts of history and culture, toward a world free from enslavement to historical lies and unexamined beliefs.
Humanity is a species endangered by its beliefs, and most of all, its religious illusion of superiority. To go beyond history is not solely a human prerogative, for the path ahead is not ours alone, but the way of all sentient beings.
Closely aligned with deep ecology, and going deeper, this site develops open source spirituality that reflects and engages the innate sanity of the human animal. It explores the prospect of a genuine planetary outlook, a way to live bonded intimately to the earth and coevolving with the non-human world. Toward that end, it invites a future myth, a story to guide the species and align one person at a time to Gaia, the living planet….
The Gaiaspora are the adepts of Mysteries yet to come who go into the future in correction with the Aeon Sophia after March 2011. They are the navigational crew who sail the mother ship toward the true destination of humanity. Coming from all races, religions, languages, and cultures, they defy the past and defeat the tyrannical lies of history by entering a visionary adventure in real time. The Captain’s Log plots this journey, recording how Gaia recovers her direction and impacts the human species with the immediate, spontaneous animation of her divine intention, her designs and purposes. – The Maine Terton Midsummer 2011
John Lash (b. 1945, New York City) has been called the true successor of Mircea Eliade and the rightful heir of Joseph Campbell. Unlike those two world-class academics, John is a self-educated free-lance scholar who combines studies and experimental mysticism to teach directive mythology: that is, the application of myth to life, rather than its mere interpretation. He is a leading exponent of the power of myth to direct individual experience and drive historical events over the long term. An expert on sidereal mythology, naked-eye astronomy, precession, and the World Ages, he also teaches the critique of belief-systems. On metahistory.org, he presents a radical revision of Gnosticism, with original commentaries on the Nag Hammadi codices. He also presents the only complete restoration by any scholar of the Sophianic myth of the Pagan Mysteries, the sacred story of Gaia-Sophia, recounting the origin of the earth and the human species from the galactic core. (https://www.metahistory.org/siteauthor.php)
Please Donate to the continued works of John Lamb Lash: http://gaiaspora.org/donate/#post-1266 and join NEMETA.org (new) Sophianic School of Arts and Sciences www.nemeta.org
BOOK: NOT IN HIS IMAGE: Gnostic Vision, Sacred Ecology, and the Future of Belief
More Information: http://metahistory.org/sitemap.php
Purchase Book here: http://www.chelseagreen.com/not-in-his-image
NOT IN HIS IMAGE: Gnostic Vision, Sacred Ecology, and the Future of Belief
The transition from a Pagan civilization of great antiquity to our Christianized one is historically denoted as “The Dark Ages.” Why “dark”? What was lost?
Not in His Image tells the story of that loss. It exposes the most massive campaign of cultural genocide in human history. It probes—as no other book before it—the hidden roots of the ecological crisis that now threatens life on the planet. This investigation leads deep into the realm of the predator reality in which we now live, engulfed and lost to the point of either denial or impotent fury. And it shows how predators and prey have become locked into a vicious cycle of collusion.
Not in His Image describes the rich spiritual world of pre-Christian classical Europe—the Pagan Mysteries, the Great Goddess, Gnosis, the myths of Sophia and Gaia—and its future as a force for rebalancing our lives and reconnecting to the earth. In his riveting account of who the Gnostics really were and what they were protesting against, John Lash identifies who we once were, and what has become of our original genius. He describes the decisive arc of history from the dawn of the Christian Era to the present moment of global terror, a trajectory driven faith-based violence and fundamentalist politics. No scholar has yet plumbed the depths of the Nag Hammadi Library for the profound cosmological myth of our origins and our intimate bond with Gaia, the living planet.
The Gnostic story of the Wisdom Goddess, Sophia, is directly counterpoised to the one Christianity and other monotheistic religions teach us. It explains why a species made in the image of the Father God cannot live peacefully on earth. In Sophia we discover the true foundations of deep ecology. For those of us perplexed by the state of the world and the plight of the planet, Not in His Image gives us back our true story, a myth to guide us beyond faith-based violence toward a sacred ecological path for the future.
John Lamb Lash, a true heir to Mircea Eliade, is the foremost exponent of the power of myth to shape our lives and history itself. He is a co-founder and principal author of Metahistory.org. He has written a number of books including The Seeker’s Handbook (Crown), Twins and the Double (Thames & Hudson), The Hero—Manhood and Power (Thames & Hudson), and Quest for the Zodiac (Starhenge Books). The author lives in Europe.
Chelsea Green Publishing
October 2006
Hardcover | 5 5.8 x 8 5.8 | 320 pages
ISBN 1-931498-92-X
World Rights
Bibliography, Index
RELIGION/PHILOSOPHY
• National radio tour
• National media interviews
• Reveals deep history behind The Da Vinci Code
• Off-the-book-page features
www.Nemeta.org – Sophianic School of Arts and Sciences
www.SophianicMyth.org – Discover The Home Story, The Fallen Goddess Scenario 1.5
The Gaia Mythos: http://metahistory.org/FallenGoddess.php
The Gaia Mythos: To free ourselves of the separatist beliefs encoded in the stories that define and direct our lives is a great challenge, and a wonderful opportunity. The strands of a different story about humanity are spun through our minds like threads on a loom — but how do we weave them into a coherent design? The decisive shift for humanity today is not only a change of events, but a change in how events are told, a new adventure in mythmaking.
To develop a different story about life on earth, we must first and foremost place ultimate trust in ourselves, not in unexamined beliefs, or blind tradition, or authorities. Living into the story ahead, a Gaian tale to guide the species, depends on the inspiration to imagine the tale, and the language to tell it in its fullness and depth.
This introduction is about the language required for our story with Gaia, the living planet.
Gaia, like all living organisms, must rely on memory to be self-guiding. Any creature that cannot remember what it does cannot guide its actions in an intelligent or purposeful way. Likewise for Gaia: She also must be able to remember Her experience, including the experience of the species She carries in Her womb, the biosphere. The adventure of the Gaia Mythos is our way to discover our share in the mystery of Her larger purposes, even as we come to remember, in Her behalf, what those purposes might be.
Story Synopsis: This story is about who Gaia was before She united with the Earth, and how She came to be the indwelling intelligence of the planet and the mother of terrestrial species. The story is told in four Parts, each consisting of brief Episodes:
One, Fallen Goddess
Two, Gaia Awakening
Three, The Gender Rift
Four, In Tomorrow’s Light
Part One, Fallen Goddess (Episodes 1 through 16), opens with a company of gods called Aeons, divinities who dwell in the core of our home galaxy. It tells how one of these immortal powers, the Aeon Sophia as she was known to Gnostics, departed in a reckless way from the core, producing havoc in the outer region of the galaxy, then falling into a swoon. It recounts how Sophia, in Her shock and disorientation, gradually realizes that She has precipitated an anomaly in the cosmos, giving rise to the planetary system in which the Earth She embodies is captured. Complications involving an inorganic species called the Archons put Her in a rather tricky situation with the human species.
Part Two, Gaia Awakening, recounts the long sequence of moments in which the Fallen Goddess awakens to her new identity as “Mother Earth.” It describes the geological epochs of the Earth and the emergence of the kingdoms of nature in terms of Gaian “morphic fields.”
Part Three, The Gender Rift, describes a curious affliction of humanity, manifested in malice between the sexes, that arises due to Sophia’s plunge, and explains how humans are involved with Gaia in healing this condition.
Part Four, In Tomorrow’s Light describes the future of the Earth and the possible role of humanity in view of Gaia’s own purposes.
The myth of Sophia’s Fall was taught for centuries in the Pagan Mysteries and recounted in Gnostic writings that survive in fragmentary form. It is distinct from the Judeo-Christian-Islamic story of the Fall (the Genesis narrative), and, in fact, reverses the values and beliefs encoded in that well-known scenario. The Gaia Mythos is a close reconstruction of sacred teachings lost to humanity for almost two thousand years.
Sharing the Gaia Mythos
Metahistory.org exposes and examines the beliefs encoded in many narratives, variations of the six kinds of scripts, but it is concerned above all with stories that describe human potential and how it can be fulfilled. The aim of metacritique is to evaluate these stories by decoding the beliefs they carry, thus to determine if those beliefs are productive and beneficial to humanity, or if they are otherwise. But Metahistory.org does not confine itself to the critique of such narratives, however. It also goes beyond them and proposes “a planetary myth”. All who share this adventure participate in a myth in the making. This introduction sets out the basics of mythopoesis, the act of conscious mythmaking.
The Fall of the Wisdom Goddess
http://metahistory.org/FallenGoddess.php
Although not the most precious species – all her progeny are precious to the planetary animal mother – humankind has the rare privilege to participate intimately in Sophia’s correction, her realignment to the cosmic source, the Pleroma. But to do this the Anthropos must first correct itself. It must realize its own true potential, and face and master the deviance represented by the archons. How humankind meets this challenge, and how the correction of Gaia’s cosmic trajectory will be accomplished, belong to the present and future, unwritten part of Sophia’s story.
www.SophianicMyth.org – Discover The Home Story, The Fallen Goddess Scenario 1.5
Nature performeth her operations gradually; and indeed I would have thee do the same: let thy imagination be guided wholly by nature. And observe according to nature, through whom the substances regenerate themselves in the bowels of the earth. And imagine this with true and not with fantastic imagination.
Artis Auriferae, “The Art of Goldmaking” (Compiled 1610 AD)
www.Nemeta.org – Sophianic School of Arts and Sciences
www.SophianicMyth.org – Discover The Home Story, The Fallen Goddess Scenario 1.5
Please Donate to the continued works of John Lamb Lash: http://gaiaspora.org/donate/#post-1266 and join NEMETA.org (new) Sophianic School of Arts and Sciences www.nemeta.org
BOOK: NOT IN HIS IMAGE: Gnostic Vision, Sacred Ecology, and the Future of Belief
More Information: http://metahistory.org/sitemap.php
Purchase Book here: http://www.chelseagreen.com/not-in-his-image
Gaian Light 