Part 1: Prolegomenon to the Study of Hollywood Gnosticism

November 2026

…one could see the whole of the mass media as it stands today as some sort of extension of Gnostic faith.

–Richard Stanley, 1994¹

Nag Hammadi to Hollywood

Star Trek V: The Final Frontier (1989), Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979)

Critics who charge Hollywood with being a factory of hyper-Satanic toxic culture have, for a long time now, routinely invoked the category “gnosticism.” Almost by definition, this criticism comes from the right. Indeed, the more general pejorative use of “gnostic” and “gnosticism,” as a spiritual diagnosis of an ideological and cultural disease, is to a great extent the inheritance of Eric Voegelin’s mid-twentieth-century conservative critique of liberalism and modern liberal movements. For Voegelin, “gnosticism” encompasses everything from “progressivism, positivism, Hegelianism, and Marxism,” to “psychoanalysis, communism, fascism, and national socialism.”² Under the influence of Voegelin and a variety of other writers not necessarily on the right, like Hans Jonas, such promiscuous use of the category seeped into all manner of discourse. As religious scholar Ioan Couliano quipped, in the 1980s, “Not only Gnosis was gnostic, but the catholic authors were gnostic, the neoplatonic too, Reformation was gnostic, Communism was gnostic, Nazism was gnostic, liberalism, existentialism, and psychoanalysis were gnostic too, modern biology was gnostic.”³ More recently, as Millary discusses in his editorial intro to CES 3, the so-called dissident right has inherited this legacy of “semantic inflation,” wielding “gnosticism” as an ideological bludgeon against enemies great and small, and even against each other, without any consistent and meaningful definition of the term.⁴ Nor is the significance of “gnostic” and “gnosticism” always very clear in the context of traditionalist and right-wing critiques of contemporary Hollywood.

Nevertheless, certain themes and tropes are widely identified as gnostic, and rightly so, especially plots that involve protagonists trapped in simulated worlds devised by evil tyrants. As many are aware, a sudden spate of these gnostic movies hit theaters between 1998 and 1999, most notably The Truman Show (1998), The Matrix (1999), Dark City (1998), The Thirteenth Floor (1999), and Existenz (1999). More than one has had a major cultural impact.

The gnostic character of these narratives has been widely recognized outside of the political right as well and has garnered substantial attention from academics. These authors, however, tend to valorize gnosticism as a positive and liberatory form of spirituality. April DeConick, one of the world’s leading scholars of ancient Gnosticism, is a prime example. She frames each chapter of her 2016 book The Gnostic New Age with commentary on a different “Gnostic” film, including The Matrix, The Truman Show, and Dark City, as well as three others released in the last two years of the millennium: Dogma (1998), Pi (1998), and Pleasantville (1998). She also discusses Man of Steel (2013), Altered States (1980), Star Trek V: The Final Frontier (1989), Avatar (2009), and the 1987 TV miniseries Out on a Limb, starring Shirley MacLaine as herself in the midst of a New Age spiritual awakening. “In these contemporary films,” writes DeConick, “we see Gnostics as heroes whose words and deeds are valorized and glorified rather than condemned and vilified.” Gnosticism, according to her conception, is a “countercultural spirituality” which emerged from the “New Age” religious milieu of late antiquity. Analogously, she sees the 1960s counterculture and the succeeding New Age—with their rejection of traditional religious authority, eclectic blend of mystical spirituality, and celebration of the individual quest for direct religious experience—as contemporary expressions of the Gnostic impulse. The rise of Gnostic cinema is, as far as she’s concerned, another promising sign of the “Gnostic Renaissance,” which is supposedly reversing the slander committed against the ancient Gnostics by the Christian heresiologists.⁵

In 2018, when I first read The Gnostic New Age, this sort of thought resonated with me, during a phase in which I literally identified as a gnostic. I even subscribed to the Aeon Byte Gnostic Radio podcast, which is how I discovered DeConick. Jeffrey Kripal, her longtime colleague in the Department of Religion at Rice, has also made multiple appearances on Aeon Byte Radio, though I think I heard him first on a different podcast at about the same time, discussing his book Mutants and Mystics: Science Fiction, Superhero Comics, and the Paranormal (2015). As a self-styled mystic and longtime dabbler in the esoteric and occult, I was quickly drawn to DeConick’s and Kripal’s crusade to vindicate direct religious experience as a source of knowledge inside the walls of the academy, as reflected in the Department’s stated commitment to honoring “unconventional wisdom.” Above all, I was eager to take the GEM (Gnosticism, esotericism, and mysticism) courses. So I applied to the program.

Most of the films in The Gnostic New Age were required viewing for DeConick’s Gnosticism seminar in the spring of 2020. By then, I was at the beginning of a conversion to Orthodox Christianity—a spiritual transformation that, as in the cases of a great many other people, was very much catalyzed by the COVID-1984 madness that descended in the middle of that semester, on Friday the 13^th. Finding myself increasingly alienated from the neo-gnostic spiritual outlook that admittedly motivates DeConick’s scholarship, I soon abandoned the study of ancient Gnosticism to write about transhumanism. While she was still my advisor, though, I asked her what she thought was behind the rash of gnostic movies released in 1998–1999. Expecting that she might take a Jungian view of the matter, reading it as a spontaneous manifestation of the collective unconscious or of the perennial revival of gnostic mysticism or something, I was surprised that her focus was rather on quite specific—and personal—channels of influence. She exhorted me to investigate the overlaps in personnel between these productions, and she may have even tipped me off that Dark City and The Matrix share a producer (Andrew Mason). She was also totally convinced that Elaine Pagels’s The Gnostic Gospels (1979) had exerted an enormous influence in Hollywood, and she insisted that the real gnostic turn in Hollywood occurred not in the late 1990s but rather in the early 80s, in the wake of Pagels’s popularization of the Nag Hammadi texts discovered in 1946.

There may be something to the theory, and she seemed to have some solid reasons for believing it that I never heard about. I did learn, from my time in the department, how certain scholars of comparative religion, Kripal (former chair at Esalen and longstanding member of the board) noteworthy among them, exert an important but invisible influence on Hollywood storytelling (comic book cinema, in the case of Kripal). For legal reasons alone, this influence is deliberately obscured. It’s nonetheless common knowledge that religious comparativist and New Age darling Joseph Campbell practically rewrote the book on Hollywood storytelling via George Lucas. Common knowledge as well, at least among a certain niche group of researchers, is South African-born director Richard Stanley’s statement, in a 1994 magazine interview, that “one could see the whole of the mass media as it stands today as some sort of extension of Gnostic faith”—lending further support to the theory that Hollywood was thoroughly gnosticized well in advance of the turn of the millennium.⁶

Total Recall (1990), one of the films analyzed below as a paradigm of gnostic cinema, predates the late 90s surge, as do three of the titles on DeConick’s list. While not all of the latter productions should be definitively classified as “gnostic,” Star Trek V definitely qualifies. Directed by William Shatner himself, the film offers a particularly crude and striking example of the classic gnostic trope in which a figure or being identifying itself as the Creator God turns out to be a wicked imposter. The plot is set in motion by Spock’s half-brother, an outcast Vulcan shaman named Sybok who is on a quest for “the ultimate knowledge.” Prompted by visions of a powerful being which Sybok believes is God Almighty, he hijacks the Enterprise and sets it on a course to pierce the “Great Barrier,” an energy field at the boundary of the known universe, on the other side of which he expects to have a mystical encounter in the flesh. Instead, what confronts Sybok and the crew of the Enterprise in the film’s climax is a malevolent alien that plays to their concept of God, manifesting as the stereotypical image of various deities and religious figures. It intends to send them back as missionaries of Sybok’s false religion. When Kirk challenges the thing’s divinity, it explodes in fury, firing eye lasers at the unbelievers to compel their submission.

According to Shatner, who lays claim to the original story idea, in the earliest scripts the false God was not an alien but the devil himself. Gene Roddenberry supposedly objected to introducing explicit religious themes into the franchise and suggested they soften the character by making it “an alien claiming to be God” rather than “really God or really the devil.” For Roddenberry, however, transferring the spiritual theme into a more decidedly sci-fi register was simply a compromise for the sake of the audience. In “The God Thing,” Roddenberry’s screenplay that would evolve into Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979), the alien is referred to as a “Deceiver-God.” His original story concept floats the idea that “the God of the Old Testament, full of tirades and demands to be worshipped, actually turned out to be Lucifer,” in which case “the serpent’s offer of the Fruit of Knowledge” was “actually a gift from the real God.”⁷ In a word, these Star Trek narratives are meant to perform precisely the same inversion of Genesis 3 that, as I demonstrated in the prequel to this study, is at the heart of the ancient Gnostic heresy. The same inversive hermeneutics is also the key to deciphering the complicated relationship between ancient Gnosticism and contemporary Hollywood.

Spiral of Inversion: From Transcendental to Luciferian Gnosticism

Revalorizing the serpent of Genesis 3 into the bearer of gnosis is a standard feature of Gnostic mythology. In “Hermeneutics of Total Suspicion,” I examined the whole range of ancient Gnostic reworkings of the serpent in the garden of Eden as a case study to illustrate how the principle of inversion operates at the foundation of Gnostic hermeneutics (textual interpretation). The Gnostic (mis)readings of Genesis 3, derived from this inversive hermeneutics, encapsulate a transgressive spirituality defined by the hubristic desire for self-deification, or apotheosis. All ancient Gnostics rejected the identification of the Creator of the Old Testament with the true God, regarding the former as a pretender, a mere demiurge (Greek for “craftsman”) responsible for bringing into existence only the lowest and lowliest dimension of reality, including the human body and soul in which the spirit or divine spark is imprisoned.

The Gnostics were mystics, and they attained this knowledge, as they fancied, by inducing altered states of consciousness. During these mystical ascents, they perceived themselves transcending the illusory created order and reaching the pinnacle of the aeons, where they encountered the Invisible Spirit and realized their own true nature as coextensive with God. According to their mythologies, however, only a small minority of humans can thus achieve apotheosis via gnosis; the rest will inevitably remain locked in ignorance, endlessly gulled by archontic psyops. The Sethians, of course, identified themselves as this minority, i.e., the pneumatic or spiritual race descended from Seth (Adam and Eve’s first son after Cain’s murder of Abel).

On their journey out of the archontic darkness, the spiritual race receives crucial aid from various aeonic helpers, who snap into action the moment Sophia disturbs the divine economy. A leitmotif of the Gnostic myth in general is this battle between archons and aeons, the forces of darkness devising one stratagem after another to keep humanity locked in darkness, while the forces of light continually foil them, sneaking salvific knowledge past the archontic bodyguards and delivering it to the spiritual race. Even Jesus is demoted to the status of an aeonic emissary, sent to enlighten humans and thus dispel Yaldabaoth’s wicked designs. But what this mytheme encodes is the hermeneutics underlying their spirituality

Because the archontic powers control not only the material but also the psychic realm, ordinary human faculties, including the intellect, are subject to their manipulation. Religious texts for the Gnostics were therefore understood as scrambled messages of a sort, which yielded truth only after being deciphered or decoded in the light of their mystical gnosis. A passage that I highlighted in the CES 3 study from the Valentinian Gnostic text known as the Gospel of Phillip encapsulates the mythical framework underlying this hermeneutics:

The rulers wanted to fool people, since they saw that people have a kinship with what is truly good. They took the names of the good and assigned them to what is not good, to fool people with names and link the names to what is not good. So, as if they are doing people a favor, they take the names from what is not good and transfer them to the good, in their own way of thinking. For they wished to take free people and enslave them forever.⁹

Because the mind pursues truth through “names,” and because malicious entities are working tirelessly to deceive and spiritually enslave humanity by associating the “names of the good” with “what is not good” (and vice-versa), extracting truth from religious texts like the Bible is an exercise in reverse engineering the “names,” i.e., reversing or inverting the literal meanings and accepted interpretations. This is by no means a simple matter, however.

For example, as illustrated in my study, most Gnostics actually deplored the figure of the serpent itself, interpreting the serpent of Genesis 3 as a deliberate inversion of the aeonic emissary who delivers gnosis to Adam and Eve. These anti-serpent Gnostics considered the Biblical identification of the serpent-as-devil with the gnosis-bringer to be a kind of spiritual psyop designed to tarnish gnosis (deifying spiritual knowledge) through association with sensuality and evil (symbolized by the serpent). Other, likely earlier groups practiced what I called “strict inversion,” simply taking the serpent as a positive figure in a rather crude reversal of the text.

In principle, any given spiritual doctrine or message, resulting from the interpretation of a text, could have originated from either an aeonic or archontic source. But even if it originally came from the aeons, there is no guarantee that the archons didn’t get a hold of it and distort it in such a way that the text in which it is encoded will be improperly interpreted by anyone lacking gnosis. On the other hand, even if a message came from the archons, it may be intercepted by a benevolent aeon, so that it ultimately conveys a spiritual truth in spite of the archons’ machinations. The point is that only those with the hermeneutical keys are in a position to unravel all the inversions and the inversions of inversions.

This inversive hermeneutics opens up a bottomless hole of spiritual suspicion, a total suspicion, in which any and all religions or spiritual teachings may be tainted by archontic psyops. The adherents of these Gnostic systems would of course reply to the charge by appealing to the mystical ascents whereby they supposedly attained these hermeneutical keys via deifying gnosis. Yet, the textual evidence portrays a seemingly endless spiral of suspicion in the proliferation of Gnostic systems, as different Gnostic sects espoused an assortment of deeply incompatible views, both metaphysically and ethically, and over time they charged each other with being duped by the archons and peddling a false or counterfeit gnosis.

A critical case in point—which will carry us straight into the dark heart of Hollywood gnosticism—is the polar contrast in attitudes toward sexual morality among different classes of ancient Gnostics. Encratic sects, like most of those adopting variants of the Sethian myth likely were, engaged in the excessive asceticism criticized by St. Paul. Other sects were antinomians, also a target of St. Paul’s epistles, who rejected the Mosaic law with its underlying morality as the creation and tool of the demiurge. The Carpocratians went so far as to make a virtue of sexual licentiousness, on the logic that willful violations of the law weaken the psycho-spiritual dominance of the archons and thereby draw one closer to attaining salvific gnosis from the aeons. Indeed, as St. Irenaeus explains, citing their own writings, the Carpocratians insisted that a soul must participate in “every kind of life and in every act,” including committing every possible sin, in order to escape the cycle of reincarnation within “the prison” known as the body.¹⁰         

Predictably, the spiral of moral degradation unleashed by antinomian doctrines spawned groups like one described by fourth-century bishop and heresiologist Epiphanius, a cult known in various parts of the Eastern Roman Empire as the Borborites or Phibionites, as well as the Stratiotics and the Gnostics. Rejecting all forms of ascetism and sexual morality as malicious ploys designed by the “archon who made the world,” and thus abandoning themselves to all manner of depravity, these Gnostics identified semen and menstrual blood as the body and blood of Christ and consumed them at the culmination of their unholy sexual rites.¹¹ They spurned procreation, of course, regarding human reproduction as the chief archon’s scheme to build more prisons in which to trap spirit. In the event that a woman was accidentally impregnated, Epiphanius explains, they performed a still “more dreadful” and blasphemous burlesque of the sacraments:

They extract the fetus at the stage which is appropriate for their enterprise, take this aborted infant, and cut it up in a trough with a pestle. And they mix honey, pepper, and certain other perfumes and spices with it to keep from getting sick, and then all the revellers in this < herd > of swine and dogs assemble, and each eats a piece of the child with his fingers.  (6) And now, after this cannibalism, they pray to God and say, “We were not mocked by the archon of lust, but have gathered the brother’s blunder up!” And this, if you please, is their idea of the “perfect Passover.”¹²

The resemblance to Satanic black masses and child sacrifices, from the Renaissance up to the contemporary Crowleyite occult (drawing direct inspiration from the ancient Gnostics), hardly needs emphasis. Epiphanius gained this information firsthand, through an encounter with some of their women who tried to sexually entice him into joining the cult. The fact that he and other heresiologists also report about encratic, or hyper-ascetic, Gnostics lends further credit to the account. Anyway, the Borborites weren’t the only antinomian Gnostics performing recognizably Satanic rituals. In my survey of the various Gnostic groups’ attitude toward the serpent, I mentioned a serpent-revering Ophite sect that practiced a blasphemous counter-eucharist in which a snake is released from a basket to coil around and sanctify loaves of bread, after eating which participants kiss the snake on the mouth.¹³

The Final Inversion: Gnostic Satanism

In a word, the most radical of these antinomian Gnostics, pretending to be disciples of Christ, wound up in a total inversion of Christian theology and sacramental life. Without exception, they justified these bizarre and perverse inversions by means of their hermeneutics of total suspicion. The Borborites, for example, 

use both the Old and the New Testaments, but renounce the Speaker in the Old Testament. And whenever they find a text the sense of which can be against them, they say that this has been said by the spirit of the world. But if a statement can be represented as resembling their lust—not as the text is, but as their deluded minds take it—they twist it to fit their lust and claim that it has been spoken by the Spirit of truth.¹⁴

An analogous pairing of Satanism and “left-hand” gnosticism, in our own times, is a salient feature of Hollywood occultism and of superclass spirituality more generally. Those who have made this observation, armed with even a superficial knowledge of the ancient Gnostics, will have wondered, though, how an ancient heretical movement that originally advocated the most excessive asceticism, regarding anything to do with the material world as filthy and evil, could come to have such an outsize influence on the contemporary dark occult and therewith the entertainment media and the culture at large. We have already glimpsed the solution to the riddle in the transition to (or relationship between) encratic and antinomian strains of ancient Gnosticism: the tendency toward an endless spiral of inverting textual interpretations, founded on a bottomless suspicion concerning the role played by dark spiritual powers in manipulating such interpretations, sooner or later produces systems and practices that approximate what can be called total spiritual depravity.

Yet all ancient Gnostics, even the most Satanically antinomian ones like the Borborites, conceived of a transcendent, or aeonic, realm at the pinnacle of which sat a transcendent God whom they were trying to reach. Within the worldview of Hollywood gnosticism, by contrast, neither a supreme God nor a transcendent realm of any sort has a place, except to deceive the uninitiated. Reality itself is understood as a construct of perception, and thus systematic control over perception is tantamount to control over reality. The underlying goal is not escape from a simulated prison world or the overthrow of the tyrannical demiurge responsible for its construction; rather, the goal is to master the Method of perceptual manipulation, which amounts to world-building, and thus to become the demiurge. What is distinctly gnostic about this style of neo-gnosticism is that it is a continuation of the selfsame hermeneutics, now carried to such radical extremes as to invert the original Gnostic systems at their foundation, negating the metaphysics of transcendence, on the one hand, and revalorizing the Gnostic devil into the archetype of self-deification, on the other. This dual move constitutes the hermeneutical key to unlocking the gnosticism of the contemporary superclass, including Hollywood gnosticism.

In the epilogue to the CES 3 article, I referred to this as the “final inversion.” Whereas the ancient Gnostics slandered the true God under the delusion of slandering the devil in disguise, their neo-gnostic counterparts today are Satanists or Luciferians quite consciously in rebellion against the Christian God. The two most influential occult figures of the last 150 years, Crowley and Helena Blavatsky, combined the explicit revalorization of Satan with a renewed interest in Gnosticism (e.g., Crowley’s “Gnostic Mass”). Hence, one of the defining tropes of gnostic cinema, lifted straight from classic Gnostic mythology, is the denigration or dethroning of figures meant to be types or analogues of the Christian God. I gave two of the Star Trek films as relatively early—and striking—examples, but nowadays it is a standard narrative device.

Consider, for example, Thanos, the apparent villain of Avengers: Infinity War (2018). As co-director Anthony Russo explains, Infinity War “is really Thanos’s movie, he’s the lead in the film.”¹⁵ In the audio commentary track, the Russo brothers go even further, giving away the Marvel formula for deconstructing God the Father. The narrative, they explain, is essentially the “hero’s journey” of Thanos, the supervillain whose name derives from the Greek word for death. This term, hero’s journey, comes from Joseph Campbell, whose theory of the hero’s journey “monomyth” supposedly underlying all the world’s mythologies made an indelible imprint on Hollywood storytelling via his relationship to George Lucas. The monomyth is best exemplified, according to Campbell, in the stories of Jesus and the Buddha. Hollywood has not simply been repackaging and reworking the monomyth, however; it has been deconstructing it in stages, at length producing an inverted monomyth in which Satan/Lucifer (whose power is death), rather than Jesus (bestower of life), is the protagonist. In doing so, Hollywood has become an increasingly open vehicle for narrating the antihero’s journey of Satan.

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Notes:

1. Paddy’s Pain, “Report from the Underground,” interview with Richard Stanley, Kinokaze #1 (1994), http://www.everythingisundercontrol.org/nagtloper/iviews/kinokaze.php. ↩︎
2. Eric Voegelin, “Science, Politics, and Gnosticism: Two Essays,” in The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, Volume 5, edited by Manfred Henningsen (Columbia, Missouri: University of Missouri Press, 2000), 247, 295. ↩︎
3. Ioan Couliano, “The Gnostic Revenge: Gnosticism and Romantic Literature,” in Gnosis und Politik, edited by Jacob Taubes (Paderborn: Schöningh, 1984), 290. ↩︎
4. Thomas Millary, “From the Desk of the Managing Editor: Hollywood Neo-Gnosticism,” Cultural Engineering Studies, vol. 3 (Mar. 2026), 8. ↩︎
5. April DeConick, The Gnostic New Age: How a Countercultural Spirituality Revolutionized Religion from Antiquity to Today (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016), 16–18. ↩︎
6. Paddy’s Pain, “Report from the Underground.” ↩︎
7. Susan Sackett and Gene Roddenberry, The Making of Star Trek: The Motion Picture (New York: Pocket Books, 1980), 24. ↩︎
8. John D. Turner and Marvin Meyer, trans., “The Secret Book of John,” in The Nag Hammadi Scriptures, ed. Marvin Meyer (New York: Harper One, 2007), 114-115. ↩︎
9. “The Gospel of Philip,” trans. Madeleine Scopello and Marvin Meyer, in Nag Hammadi Scriptures, 163 (Gos. Phil. NHC II,3 54.18–31). ↩︎
10. St. Irenaeus, Against the Heresies, Vol. I, Book I, trans. Dominic J. Unger (NY: The Newman Press, 1992), 88 (25.4). ↩︎
11. Epiphanius, The Panarion of Epiphanius of Salamis, Book I, Second Edition, trans, Frank Williams (Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 2009), 95 (Pan. 26.5.8); see 94 (Pan. 26.4.4). ↩︎
12. Epiphanius, Panarion, 95 (Pan. 26.5.4–6). ↩︎
13. See Ephipanius, Panarion, 265 (Pan. 37.5.6–7). ↩︎
14. Epiphanius, Panarion, 95 (6.1–2). ↩︎
15. Quoted in Jacqueline Coley, “Joe and Anthony Russo Go Deep on Avengers: Endgame and Infinity War,” Rotten Tomatoes, Jun. 4, 2019, https://editorial.rottentomatoes.com/article/joe-and-anthony-russo-go-deep-on-avengers-endgame-and-infinity-war/. ↩︎