 and welcome everyone to We Are Being Transformed. Today, we have a very special guest for a very special event. This is our very first live stream. So thank you all for watching, whether you're watching live or whether you're watching later. I truly appreciate everyone's supports. So as you know, We Are Being Transformed is a show where we explore the myriad of ways in which people are transformed and transform their culture through the mediums of ritual, religion, lore. So without further ado, I will bring on our guest and welcome Dr. Dylan Burns. How are you? I'm fine. How are you, Jason? I'm fantastic. I'm very hyped for this, very excited and honored. We are very floored that you would agree to be on our lives. So thank you again for coming. This is going to be a barn burner, as they say. Well. So today, we're going to be discussing your book, a seminal study on the culture wars between Neoplatonic thought and Scythian Gnosticism. This book, of course, is titled Apocalypse of the Alien God. So we're just going to kind of go through it. It's one of my favorite books, just in general, in terms of Gnostic studies. So let's just get into it. So in Apocalypse of the Alien God, you refer to this period of time as a culture war. It's not just a culture war between Neoplatonic and Scythian Gnostic Christians, though. As you say, it's something deeper going on in the academic circles and in the philosophical circles of the Greco-Roman world. So I didn't know if you could talk a little bit about that. Yeah, sure. So what is this culture war? Who are the Scythian Gnostics and what do they have to do with philosophy? In short, we knew very little about who the Gnostics or so-called knowers of Mediterranean antiquity were until the discovery of texts preserved in Coptic that contain many works and ideas that are associated with legions and reports about these Gnostics and antiquity. But one of these reports that we have from antiquity that's not in these Coptic books that were discovered in modernity is from the philosopher Porphyry. And Porphyry, he's writing around the turn of the fourth century, around 300 CE, a life, a biography of his teacher, Plotinus. And Plotinus, Porphyry's teacher is the last great representative of Greek thought and antiquity. Usually historians of philosophy consider him the last big Greek philosopher. I think that's an exaggeration. There are lots of other great Greek philosophers from this period, but Plotinus is pretty special. And Porphyry tells us that not long after he arrived in Plotinus's circle, there was circulating in among Plotinus and the people reading with Plotinus, Plotinus is students, for lack of a better word. There were circulating a number of books and Porphyry specifically says that these were revelations, apocalypses. The word he uses is apocalypses, Greek, so revelations. And these revelations had names. He gives the titles of some of these revelations. Revelations assigned to the authority of Zoroaster and Zostrianos, Aloe Genes and Messos. And teachers who had circulated this material. Yeah, thank you, Jason. This is exactly the passage that I'm talking about. It is teachers who are circulating these apocalypses that Plotinus knew about. They alleged that Plato had actually not penetrated the depth of intelligible substance. This is the phrase that Porphyry uses in plain English. This would be Plato had not got the whole truth. Plato did not go as deep as some of these revelations that these apocalypses were talking about. And Plotinus refuted the position of these books in his seminar and he asked two of his students, one of them Porphyry, the author of this biography and the other Emilius to write refutations of some of these apocalypses. So this is a very interesting datum about the Gnostics. Porphyry says that there are Christians in Rome circulating these apocalypses that Plotinus wrote about. These Christians were called Gnostics, Gnosticoi. But with the discovery of the Naqmari courtesies, we turned up certain books that share titles with those mentioned by Porphyry in this report. Okay, Zostrianos is one of them from Naqmari Codex VIII and then Aroganes from Naqmari Codex XI. And even to the very first readers of the Naqmari texts, it was clear that these and some, as well as some other texts in the Naqmari corpus were filled with the language of Neoplatonism and thus seem to have some relationship to the school of Plotinus in the third century. And so a natural question to ask then is with these Coptic books, the Naqmari collection, do we have Coptic translations of the Greek texts that Plotinus had read already in the third century CE? In other words, do we finally get to read the Gnostic material that Plotinus and his students discussed and refuted? That's a big question. So scholars had been working on this since the 70s, really. And in my doctoral research, I chose to write about this as well. And that's the book that became Apocalypse of the Alien God. So why did I refer to cultural wars and trying to characterize this exchange and the reading of Plotinus and these ancient Apocalypses, versions of which we have discovered at Naqmari? Other scholars, when I was beginning my work on this stuff 15 years ago or so, other scholars were looking at everything that these texts had in common with Plotinus. And also asking if we, with these Naqmari texts had discovered Plotinus as sources, that is the Naqmari foundation of the last Great Greek philosopher. This was the agenda of John Turner and others, especially his first-wild disciple, Ziek Mazur. But when I looked at this material, I saw they do have a lot in common, namely these Nausic Apocalypses and Coptic and Plotinus, especially with regards to contemplation and negative theology. But they're really different in some ways. And Porphyry specifically says that Plotinus attacked these texts and refuted them and asked his students to attack them and refute them. And I wanted to spell out these differences. And the way I try to summarize the main differences between Plotinus and these Nausic Apocalypses was with this phrase, culture wars. Namely, these Nausic texts represent a different cultural milieu and seem to speak to a very different audience than that we would expect in a third-century philosophical circle. Or rather, to be more precise, they represent a break with what it means to do philosophy in the third century. That is, before Plotinus, maybe Greek philosophers were reading stuff like these ancient Apocalypses. But around Plotinus's time, the distance between Nausic Christianity and Greek philosophy began to change. And with Plotinus's break with these Apocalypses, we see also a break of later Greek philosophy and Gnosticism and more generally, philosophy and theology and late antiquity. There are really two different cultures that emerge from this break that we see in Plotinus's circle at this time. Well said. Thank you for that answer. I think before we go on, and there's so much in what you just said there, I think before we go on, we really need to understand how these kind of philosophical discussions were carried out. It's the concept of Paideia. When we think about learning today, it's in many ways, it's similar, but at the same time, it's very different. So back then in antiquity, Paideia and education were carried out in very small informal kind of settings at times. And with the philosophical discussions, especially with Plotinus's lectures, you mentioned these as philosophy clubs almost. So I didn't know if you could just discuss briefly what were these philosophy clubs. Yeah, in the book, I characterize the kinds of reading groups, that the kinds of environments in which the stuff circulated as philosophy clubs. We don't have a lot of information as to the social setting in which the practice of philosophy took place in late antiquity. But we do have some records that we can use to reconstruct a plausible picture. So for example, Plutarch, the first century Platonist and author of the Lives of Famous Men. It's like famous for his lives, of course. Big source, Shakespeare used for his plays like Coriolanus. Plutarch writes about going to his philosophy teachers' house to read philosophy one afternoon. In other words, people did it in their homes. This is something that wealthy individuals that is educated people with the money and the leisure to spend an afternoon sitting around talking about metaphysics or ethics, instead of working, right? They would do this at each other's houses. Philo of Alexandria also talks about reading texts with friends at home. And when we go a few hundred years into the future and philosophers begin to write biographies of their own teachers, as well as fictional biographies of legendary figures like Pythagoras, what we see is that people are getting together in private places exactly like in Neoplatonic saints. This is a wonderful book where we have Porphyry's life of Plutinus, given along with Morinus's life of Proclus by Professor Mark Edwards at Oxford. And it's very well annotated. That's a really nice read. Yeah, great pick. Anyways, in texts like that, what we see is philosophers reading together in private spaces. Sometimes these spaces blend to other people. So Plutinus for a time is Altana Rural Estates in Campania in the middle of Italy. He seems to be there in a kind of stipend from the Imperial household where he is simply there to hold salons and entertain and talk about philosophy with people. Sounds like a nice life, right? I agree, I agree. So these are philosophy clubs. So who attended these clubs? This is a question where I had to go a little deeper and also had to reconstruct a little bit more. And what I did to try to reconstruct the clientele of these philosophy clubs, the people who, a picture of the people who attended these clubs was I looked at Sophistic culture. In this period, that is the Roman Empire of the first century CE, we see that Sophists, that is so-called wise men or rhetoricians are mixing in the same circles as philosophers. And many writers consider Sophists and philosophers to be pretty much the same, okay? And about the world of Sophistry and rhetoric in this period, we have a lot of information because the first to third century is widely considered the so-called second Sophistic. This is a period where the flourishing of Greek rhetoric rears its head once again. Of course, we have the first Sophistic and classical Athens, Socrates and Plato are responding to the Sophists there during the Roman Empire and the first century CE. We have the second Sophistic where interesting Greek rhetoric and Greek scholarship associated with rhetoric and taking place through the venues and channels of rhetoric really explodes in a big way. We have lots of great literature that comes out of this phenomenon. And there's an ideology that we see in the second Sophistic, other numerous ideologies, but some common features that we find in the various writers can tell us a little bit about what kinds of rhetorically, philosophically individual, interested individuals may have shown up in Plotinus's classes. And one of these things is that they're very pro-Greek. There's a real emphasis, this seems obvious, but in the context of Gnosticism, it's worth pointing out that this literature is very pro-Greek. It's all about learning to speak and read and write Greek really, really well, positioning oneself as an inheritor of Greek culture, somebody who is passing on a Greek tradition, even within the Roman context. Secondly, the relationship to this Roman context, it's ambivalent, different writers have different opinions about the Romans, but by and large, people who have the wherewithal to be reading rhetoric and philosophy all day are probably well positioned enough in the culture that we could think of them as socioeconomic elites in some form. And when we look at lives of philosophers from this period, we find that philosophers and Sophists very often also have civic positions. They're working in government or are positioned next to people working in government. I just mentioned how Flotinus spent a lot of his teaching time at a rural estate owned by the Empress of Rome, okay? This is, these are people who are very well connected and are often involved in public service or military service of one kind or another, all right? And this public life is also connected to public religion. We have some philosophers at this time who are not necessarily skeptical of religious practices but don't participate in all religious practices. Porphyry, for example, he's a vegetarian. He writes one of our first great treatises on vegetarianism, also Kutarch as well. But so when they go to sacrifices, they're not eating the meat there, okay? But they're still going to these sacrifices and they don't think that the engine of public sacrifice should stop because this is a very important part of Roman public life, of public sacrifices, the institution of sacrifices and its relationship to the religion of the city, that's central. These are what Flotinus refers to as the traditions of our fathers as his work against the Gnostics. And the reason I point these out is all three of these matters, relationship to Greek culture, relationship to public culture that is Roman civic culture, and specifically Roman religious culture that is civic religion involving partaking in sacrifices and especially the consumption of sacrificial meat, okay? These are things that Flotinus brings up in the treatise against the Gnostics that he wrote. The ninth treatise in the second Aeneid that is group of nine treatises that are preserved for us today. And this is a text that Porphyry entitled against the Gnostics. So when Flotinus is writing against the Gnostics, it's a rant, okay? It's a difficult text to read. He has a lot of things to say and he's changing the subject in and out. But things that come up again and again are, include that the Gnostics are not respectful enough of Greek tradition which they plagiarize but also claim to go beyond. They reject the practices of our fathers, the traditions of our fathers and they don't seem to be involved in public life or have much of a sense of public ethics. This is a big set of problems for Flotinus. And so what I tried to do when I wrote about these philosophy clubs is show that given what we know about people who attended these reading groups, Flotinus wants to describe the Gnostics as Gnostic opponents as people who don't belong in these reading groups. They don't belong to the culture of the second sophistic of Greek tradition, of Greek wisdom is a big problem with that. And when we turn to these Gnostic apocalypses, preserve that Naqamadi, we can ascertain the truth or falsity of his claims, right? And what I argue in Apocalypse of the Alien God is Flotinus doesn't seem to be making this up. These Gnostic apocalypses they're not written to appeal to the values of the second sophistic. They're written to appeal to other values and other cultures and specifically a culture that we know from Jewish and Christian apocryphal and especially apocalyptic literature. The kinds of people who are reading Christian apocalypses, they will recognize the rhetoric of these Gnostic apocalypses. So even if these Gnostic texts from Naqamadi that carry the same names, carry the same names of the texts known as Flotinus's circle. And even if these texts use a lot of metaphysical jargon, these texts do not seem to be trying to ingratiate themselves to the values of Greek philosophy. Rather, they seem to be doing their own thing and Flotinus seems to want to make a break with that, to draw a line in the sand with that. If you're gonna read with me, you gotta support certain values, he seems to be saying. Yeah, absolutely. And Yamblichus takes that another step further and all the neoplateness after him. Yeah, just fascinating. It's really, I didn't mean to interrupt if you had anything else to say. That was it. But no, thank you for that answer. Yeah, it's just fascinating. Like you were talking about how these philosophers, we tend to think of a philosopher now as like somebody who's very lowly, maybe on the economic scale, like sitting in a Starbucks all day reading Kafka or something. But yeah, these, at the time, if you're a neoplatonic philosopher especially, you're expected to be ingrained in your cultic and civic life. This is something that was especially pushed from Porphyry on. I mean, you could see it in Porphyry's name, right? Porphyry is like the color of the purple dye that they did for Kings and Emperors. Porphyry was like from a super elite family. His real name was Malkus, which means king, right? So that just kind of shows you where these people are like on the economic scale, such as economic and- And they're all like that. Yeah, exactly. Amplicus, he comes from this old Syrian royal family, Proclus, he's from a family of rich, wealthy administrators. He additionally goes to Alexandria to study law and become a big shot lawyer. This is a common path we see to philosophy in these biographies of later philosophers. They get into law, so they can get into politics and some of them fall into philosophy. Some of them don't get to escape law and politics either, Boethius, right? The guy who wrote the constellation of philosophy. Yeah? He did all right though, that's a fantastic work. He did all right until it all came back to get him. But it's wonderful. But what we see is these are very well-connected individuals. So yeah, these are not graduate students sitting in cafes. No idea what you're talking about, by the way. You know, reading Kafka, drinking coffee, that's never, I've never done that, I promise, you know? But as for antiquity, these are very well-connected individuals and they seem to be moving in circles that are initially dictated by their socio-economic, socio-political status. Yeah, I was talking with Edward Watts about Paideia in general and Watts really emphasized, he wrote the book City and School and Late Antiquity and Athens. It's a great book. Yeah, fantastic source and he really emphasized that whether you're Christian or quote-unquote pagan, the most important thing was the Paideia. You were connected by this educational kind of glue that held socio-economic bonds together. If you were an elite, you expected person with a certain kind of learning to act a certain way, especially in a very disparate sometimes empire. So yeah, fascinating stuff to think about and thank you for that. I wanted to get to another aspect of your summary there, which was something I've always found very interesting, ties into this concept that we've talked about on the show a few times before called ancient barbarian wisdom. So the Greek philosophical groups, especially the Neoplatonic groups, tend to fetishize the East auto-orientalization so there's a kind of self-orientalizing and I'm riffing off of John Walbridge's term Platonic Orientalism. It's kind of combined with the interpretatio greikai that's going on in antiquity. So what really interests me is why are these Scythians appealing to figures like Zostrianos, Alogenes, Marsanes, all these different types of barbarian wisdom and hermitism you have, of course, Hermes Trismegistus. So when the Scythians are doing this with their figures, are they firmly following in the tradition that you usually see in the interpretatio greikai and self-orientalizing philosophical groups like Neoplatonist or are they using it as a kind of counter-cultural hermeneutic? Yeah, I think it's definitely the latter and it belongs to the counter-cultural hermeneutic of early Christianity or I would prefer to say Biblical-sizing religions of late antiquity because not only Christians are into this stuff but there are people in the Bible who are doing this in a distinctive way that I think the Scythians fall in with. How is this different from the usual Platonic or Greek Orientalism that we know? What does that look like? So Numenius, for example, Second Century Platonic writer, ported source for Plotinus by all accounts. He famously asks, what is Plato but Moses speaking Greek? So this is a kind of perennialism that is espoused by Numenius. He sees ultimately no difference between the teaching of Plato and Moses and there are many other Greek writers of this period and before who espoused this fetishization of the wisdom of the East. Plato already himself in the timeus writes about the Greeks as being children next to their neighbors that is the Egyptians and I suppose the Assyrians and is, well, extremely respectful of ancient Oriental wisdom. So how is it that claims to have revelations from Zoroaster and Aloe Genes and Mussels and people like that? How does this fit into this backdrop in which Greeks are commonly appealing to ancient sages who lived in the East? I think what is going on with the Gnostic texts that claim to be written, that profess to be written by ancient sages who predate Greek civilization in some way. I think what's going on there is a little bit different than what we have with Numenius and some other texts. We have here the Thunder Perfect Mind, wonderful. Yes, where is that? Yeah, it's got that scene, the thing about, oh, sorry about that. The Greeks and the Barbarians. Yeah, I'm the wisdom of the Greeks and the knowledge of the Barbarians. I'm the judgment of Greeks and Barbarians. I'm the one whose image is great in Egypt and there was no image among the Barbarians. So yeah, there's lots of that imagery that we're talking about here in this one. Yeah, yeah, this is from La Komate Codex VI, a really terrific passage for this stuff. So this duality of Greek and Barbarian wisdom here you see a text that's tried to transcend it, of course, that invokes it in order to transcend it, really. This duality is present in so much of this ancient literature. So there are a number of ways in which this kind of Orientalism or for lack of a better term, Platonic Orientalism as James Walbridge terms it, because especially the Platonists are into this kind of perennial philosophy in this period. It's called Post-Holetic Philosophy by George Boystones. I think that's... Yeah, I'm talking to him soon about that book. Yeah, it's gonna go deep. Yeah, you should go deep. I prefer to avoid the post when I can, but it's a good book nonetheless. In any case, what makes these Setian Apocalypses that refer to sages like Sostrianos and Zoroaster or Alokines different, is that they identify themselves with these sages. They undertake something that I refer in my book to as Auto Orientalism. They do not simply say that the wisdom of the East is the same as the Greek wisdom to which they belong, which is what Numenius or Diogenes Laertius or other writers do. Rapp, or excuse me, Numenius or Plutarch, Diogenes Laertius is more dismissive of the wisdom of the East actually. So it's a degrees with the Greeks, but he's actually more of a chauvinist with regards to Hellenism. But texts like the Setianistic Apocalypses or the Hermetica, all the Chaldean oracles, or Amplicus in his work on the Mysteries, they instead take upon this image of the East as a repository of wisdom and they seize it and they identify themselves with it. And this is a step that Numenius or Plutinus, other people interested in the wisdom of the East, they do not take, okay? Even Numenius himself, when he writes about how the practices and teachings of the various barbarian nations all agree with one another and agree with the teachings of Pythagoras or Plato. If you read it closely, what he's saying is Pythagoras and Plato are right and the wisdom of the East happens to agree with it. So the Greeks are actually the first among equals for Numenius. Someone like Plutarch is a true perennialist that says, ah, it's all just the same. You can find the same myth anywhere. In Egypt, in Persia, in Plato, it's the same teaching. And then you have a third strategy which is more subjugation and that's what you have in Dogenes Laertius. Yeah, the wisdom of the East is interesting but the Greeks are really first in the party. And the last to go as well and his estimation. What these Gnostic texts do is really identify with the wisdom of the East. And this is a step that Plutinus does not take. And I think this is part of what he's getting at when he says that these texts reject the authority of Plato. They're not respectful enough to Plato. They claim that Plato did not penetrate the depth of intelligible substance. And he also encouraged Porphyry to go after the text of the Apocalypse of Zoroaster. And Porphyry shows this to have been a spurious forgery as he writes in his life of Plutinus. He specifically says that he tried to show that the text of the Apocalypse of Zoroaster was a forgery. That is, it was not really written by Zoroaster. It cannot possibly be as old as it claims to be. So this is the kind of dynamics we see in the debate about Orientalism and ancient and alien authorities in Plutinus's circle. But there's one other thing that I think makes the Scythian Apocalypse is different from the kind of Plutonic Orientalism we see in Eumenius or even the Amicus. And that is that the authorities they invoke are largely biblical authorities or authorities understood in some way in biblical terms in this period. So the character Zostrianos is described in the mainframe narrative, Zostrianos, as living among the Greeks, but he actually gets a revelation that tells him to leave his community or he belongs to another race from above, the immovable race. Then there's Aloe Genes which is a name that means alien or otherborn. And this is a term that was applied for Seth, the third child of Adam and Eve in ancient biblical and biblical sizing literature. Then we turn to Marsanes. This is another one of the Platonizing Apocalypses from Nakamari, it's preserved in Nakamari Codex 10. That seems to be an Aramaic name, Marsanes, the teacher, yeah. So there's a coloring of association with not just the East, but specifically Christian, Jewish and Syrian culture around these texts that I think is very specific. And even with someone like Zoroaster, you can say, well, Zoroaster is a pagan prophet. Okay, then there does seem to have been an Apocalypses of Zoroaster that was circulating in Plotinus's circle. And this is also one of the names of the Apocalypses, Zostrianos, in Nakamari Codex 8, the Calliphon subscriptio to the text and the Codex. We read in code oracles of Zoroaster, yeah. But Zoroaster was also identified with biblical figures by ancient authors. So what I found was that for each of the names associated with these ancient prophets invoked by the Gnostics and the texts that Plotinus knew and against which he wrote in a work or free titled Against the Gnostics, all of these names, even when they're not obviously biblical, we're associated with biblical figures by some authors. There's always a Bible connection. And I think that this may not have bothered Plotinus at first, he was, they were obviously reading the stuff in his circle in the first place. But at some point, somebody must have raised their hand and said, well, we know that these Bible figures are popular among the Christians. And the Christians, they don't do a lot of the things that we philosophers do. They don't go to sacrifice. They don't necessarily participate in public life in the same way that we do. And indeed, this controversy over these Platonizing books, if they actually took place not long after Porphyry entered Plotinus' circle, this would be the early 260s CE, that's 10 years after a persecution of Christians in Rome had ended. So there would be fresh memories among both Christians and Hellenic or pagan writers in Rome in this period of local persecutions. And this would be something, it's hard for me to imagine that this didn't come up, especially with texts that frame themselves as not just being from the East, but from a specific place in the East, a place where biblical authorities are paramount, the texts that are using a lot of metaphors and imagery that are associated with biblical literature. And this is definitely the case with these Gnostic texts. They're informed by biblical literature. Absolutely, thank you for that answer. So much rich information in there. I think, yeah, it's just really interesting to me because Plotinus, like you were saying, he really has no issue with it for a while. He's even like saying, I'm writing against my Gnostic friends, right? So these are like, these are, he's basically saying, these are my boys, but some people Porphyry might not have their best interests in mind and maybe like talking behind the scenes, like saying, hey, these people aren't, you know, like you're saying, they're not sacrificing, they're not participating in the public life, they have another, this is another way of writing, right? As you put it in the book. And this is another thing that I found fascinating in your texts, just the medium of communicating the learning and how you attain to the one was vastly different, right? So this kind of goes back to what you were talking about earlier about the interesting parallels and rich intersections of the platonic, the Platonizing Sethian works and their relation to Jewish apocalyptic. So what was it specifically about these Platonizing works? You touched upon it a little bit, but I didn't know if you had anything to add just, you know, with what we're gonna talk about here, but what would be something that Porphyry or Plotinus would find objectionable to the apocalyptic genre and its revelation of the knowledge versus the contemplation and ascent to, you know, the one, things like that, especially regards to Providence and the goodness or lack thereof of the Demiurgos. Why did he mean to call it another way of writing? Yeah, Plotinus, I'm glad you asked this question. I think it's really at the center of where Plotinus differs from the Gnostics and especially the Gnostics texts we have preserved at Naqamadi. He specifically says at some point in his treatise against the Gnostics that he can't really argue with them point by point because the Gnostic texts don't make arguments. They say stuff, but they declare things, but they're not arguing and therefore you cannot engage with them using the logical tools, the argumentative tools of Greek philosophy. Rather, he says, another way of writing would be required. What does this mean? What I think it means is that Plotinus recognizes that these texts may be full of neoplatonic metaphysical jargon. They describe heaven in terms of the world of ideas. This is their neoplatonism, okay? They give big celestial topographies of what the world of ideas looks like. Heaven is a place and it's the mind and there are levels of the mind and you can navigate that and walk through it and they give you a map, okay? And this map is described in terms of the philosophy of Plotinus's day. This is where these texts really are platonic, I think, and they should be included in the history of Platonism for this reason, but they don't arrive at this conclusion by way of argument and they don't try to convince you by making arguments that this is what the world of ideas looks like. Rather, what they describe are a set narratives where some particular individual is chosen for some reason by heaven to receive a special revelation that takes them on a kind of heavenly journey up into heaven where they see the forms for themselves and eventually make a voyage into the divine mind, attain a kind of unity with the divine mind and even take a vision or some kind of encounter with the one or first principle of all things. So what they're describing are heavenly journeys in which a privileged seer is raptured up to heaven and given divine knowledge and cosmological secrets during their heavenly voyage. And this is a framework we know from ancient apocalyptic literature, especially the apocalypses associated with the figure of Enoch, right? Enoch, we know from the book of Genesis, walked with God, this probably means he was righteous, yeah, and he did not die, rather he was taken up to heaven. And there is a flourishing of literature centered on the figure of Enoch already in the Hellenistic period and that continue to circulate in late antiquity. These are Enochic texts describing Enoch's heavenly voyages and the secrets that he attains during his heavenly voyages. So I basically argued in my book that texts like Zostrianos and Aloe Genes, these Gnostic apocalypses, they're using the Enochic framework for describing how heavenly knowledge is given and received. And this is a very different framework than that espoused by Flutinus. Flutinus, like Plato, describes entering the world of the forms as a step-by-step process in which one comes to recognize first something beautiful. Beauty is very important. This is a, and here I'm thinking of his treatise on beauty. It's a very early treatise of his and informed in turn by Plato's symposium in which you and the individual recognizes some kind of beauty in the body, a thing. Like this mug here, there's a beautiful painting on it. Yeah, so I see that. And this is the beauty of that painting on this physical object helps me come to have a contact. It draws me through my desire for that beauty, the beauty elicits a desire in me for beautiful things that are not on physical objects, the painting itself, wherever it is. And then the kind of beauty that that painting elicits, pointing beyond the painting itself, eventually taking me to the world of abstract beauties and the abstract beauty itself, the great sea of beauty as Plato describes it. So this is a step-by-step process that one learns through engaging in the philosophy with other people over the course of a lifetime as described by Plato and Plotinus. These Gnostic apocalypses describe something completely different. Heaven decides that some individual gets to go on a special trip where they are given all the secrets and they come down and tell everybody else how it really is. Sostrianos ends with a sermon where the seer having spent 100 pages up in heaven dwelling with the forms and talking with angels, being transformed into an angel, seeing things, singing hymns, he comes down and tells human beings to repent and flee from the body. And this is also a very different kind of framework than that described by Plotinus. Plotinus describes the individuals coming to have a sense of the forms and if one is very lucky having an encounter with the beyond, the one in some sense. And, but one doesn't go around preaching about it afterwards, quite the opposite. Yes, Sostrianos issues the call to awakening. But an errant multitude I awakened saying, understand you who are alive, the holy seat of Seth, do not be disobedient to me. Awaken your divine parts as divine and empower your sinless, elect soul. Yeah, even when you are ill treated, he, the father of all those will not abandon you and so forth, flee the madness and the bondage of femininity, choose for yourselves the salvation of masculinity, very gendered language, the mind in this time is considered masculine, as opposed to the body considered feminine, active versus passive figures. This is the misogyny of Pythagoreanism. In other words, there's a preachy, there's a explicitly preachy element to this ancient apocalyptic literature that I think also does not fit the Plotinian mysticism in any respect. And packaged together with the revelatory claim that these apocalypses make, I got it directly from heaven, take it or leave it. And you will decide whether to take or leave it based upon whether my use of images and cultural symbols and signals appeals to you enough. This is not how Greek philosophers argue in the third century. And this is why Plotinus finds himself at a loss to engage argumentatively with this kind of literature. How is he going to respond to, you have not come to suffer, rather you have come to escape your bondage, release yourselves and that which has bound you will be nullified. That's not an argument, it's a command. Right, how are you gonna argue with people who see themselves as a stroom so would say another seed entirely, another race, right? An elect race from like pretty much the beginning of time. So it's like, I think Plotinus might have just thrown up his hands at that point and be done with it. But yeah, interesting food for thought, thank you for that answer. I think where this is going is we're looking at these treatises, right? And they're obviously like you said in the book not written to appeal to people who have no knowledge at all of these Judeo-Christian concepts. They're obviously written to appeal to people who have some familiarity with these apocalyptic and eschatological traditions and ways of thought. So that kind of brings us up to the question of where did the Scythians come from in general? And I think my question for you, and I know it's a very divided kind of topic in scholarly circles like where exactly the Scythians came from. So many scholars, like especially John D. Turner, right? John D. Turner in his book, the famous classic study on the Scythian Gnosticism, he basically places them in a pre-Christian milieu, right? They often, like him and others often posit a complex chain of redaction of these texts, right, and the thought. But that's what I really love about Apocalypse of the Alien God that you convincingly argue that these texts, even when they don't focus on what you would think would be the typical kind of sotereological models, even when they don't focus on a figure like Seth or Jesus as much as maybe you would think they should, all these texts that are disparate as like Zostrianos, Sallorganes, the Egyptian gospel do nonetheless have a shared sotereological model? So I didn't know if you could kind of go into that a little bit. Yeah, sure, I'll begin with a little background on the Scythian Gnosticism and what is it anyways? So when the Naqmadi texts were first being translated and interpreted in the 60s and 70s, one of the great scholars working on them was Hans Martin Schenke at Humboldt University to Berlin in the German Democratic Republic that is East Germany, yeah? And Schenke really a scholar recognized that a body of these Naqmadi texts seemed to share a family resemblance, a set of family resemblances and shared mythologumina figures, names of angels, ritual references. And some of these characteristics appear in some texts and others in other texts but a family resemblance does seem to apply here. Just seem to be valid. And scholars have more or less universally accepted Schenke's observation here. They disagree about what it means, but there's no question about a quarter of the Naqmadi corpus belongs to a single literary tradition sharing or draws on a shared literary tradition of some kind. And Schenke called this literary tradition Scythian because one of the most prominent features among these family resemblances is the figure of Seth, third child of Adam and Eve, being revered in some sense as revealer, savior or pre-cosmic principle or being. Yeah? So what we find in this Scythian corpus, for this is what Schenke called it, right? Is a set of mythologumina and occasionally a description of Jesus Christ as identified with Seth in some respect. In other words, one of the problems that Schenke ran into is the question of whether the Scythian of what to do with the presence and absence of Christian features in a greater system that seems to hold together. Why among this set of family resemblances, we only sometimes find Christian references, references to the figure of Jesus or New Testament texts. And why other texts seem to draw on the same Scythian mythologumina, the same set of family resemblances but not referred to the New Testament or Jesus at all. And you could give the examples of this. So the secret book of John or so-called Apocryphon of John, this is a Christian text as we have it, right? This is a revelation uttered by Jesus full of Scythian lore. But then you take a text like the Apocalypse of Adam, which is filled with a lot of shared lore as the Apocryphon of John names of angels, veneration of Seth and demonization of the Demiurge and so forth. But it doesn't refer to Jesus explicitly and it does not refer to the New Testament. So one way that scholars got around this and Sheikah was one of them was to postulate that the Scythian tradition is older than Christianity. It belongs to a kind of Jewish Gnosticism. And over time it became Christianized either in the manuscripts or the Scythians themselves, the people espousing the Scythian myth or the mythologumina found in the Scythian text, they themselves became Christians. And this was the thesis of John Turner in his book, Scythian Gnosticism and the Platonic tradition. That is some Scythian texts. And then also if you read even Christianized Scythian texts you could discern a pre-Christian layer underneath them as in the Apocryphon of John. These give us a glimpse into pre-Christian Gnosticism in some way. And this Gnosticism became Christianized and the Christian forms these texts that we have at Nakamari. So this was common sense in the 1980s. But I was never entirely convinced by this. And there are several reasons for this. The big one is that the criterion of the presence or absence of the figure of Jesus and New Testament texts does not seem to me to be the most useful criterion for making sense of this tradition. In other words, there are lots of biblical sizing movements of late antiquity that we know about that refer to Jesus and the New Testament only sometimes. We could think of the Manichaeans, for instance. We could think of the Mendeans. Yeah, we could think of the Mendeans. There are a variety of groups that scholars have labeled a Jewish Christian in some respect. The Elkha Saits are a good one. These are movements that existed between Judaism and Christianity in late antiquity and don't really seem to belong to either, but nonetheless belong to biblical sizing cultures of this period, right? And some of them even live beyond late antiquity. Manichaeanism persisted well into the second millennium CE. The Mendeans are still around today. These are biblical movements of late antiquity that could not easily fit into our category of Jewish or Christian, and for whom the figure of Jesus or New Testament texts would be something to refer to occasionally, but not necessarily the most authoritative figure or set of texts. And the Scythian dossier seemed to fit in very well to seem to fit very well into that set of evidence, that is biblical sizing movements of late antiquity that are affiliated with Christianity in some way, but are not easily simply termed Christian. And I think the reason earlier scholarship didn't get at this was that earlier scholarship had much more conservative, old fashioned terms for breaking down this kind of literature. You know, when Sienke was writing, he was working in a faculty of, a German theological faculty, where the history of Christianity can be broken down into New Testament and Old Testament. The science of New Testament and the science of Old Testament, which would basically mean the science of Jews and the science of Christians and whatever doesn't fit into these two boxes, eh, forget about it. You know, we've come far beyond that over the last 50 years and we have much more complex and precise terms and avenues for investigating this ancient evidence that does not fit so neatly into our modern theological boxes. So I tried to go beyond that, but I don't think these categories were available to Sienke and Turner when they were beginning their research. Absolutely, well said. I think that ultimately what your work is doing, and I don't wanna spoil the book too much for everything, but there are some interesting implications that you do explore for the parallels between Manichaeism and Scythian texts in the text, but I would encourage our viewers to go and pursue the book and read for themselves, mostly because it opens a lot of can of worms that we can't get into, however enticing that is for me. But I think what I really love is that whether it be like the Greek magical papyri, whether it be Scythian Christians going to Porphyry's Neoplatonic discussion groups, these are all figures who are living in the same ecosystem and they're all interacting with each other. And that's the most important thing I take away from your book, I think. So I think what I wanted to do really quick, if you have some time, Dr. Burns, I won't take up too much more, but I wanted to discuss a colleague of yours who had an untimely passing and who were dedicating the show's memory to, Zeke Mazur. In our previous discussion on your book, Did God Care, you did mention Zeke Mazur's book, the Platonizing Scythian Background of Plotinus' Mysticism, as almost like a counterpart of Apocalypse of the Alien God. Now, in his book, he posited that Plotinus encountered Gnostic mysticism possibly fairly early, even before he studied under Ammonia Saccas. Given his thought, giving his thought a richer interactive exchange with Gnostic thought than we would normally think. Because I think what scholars tend to do and what a lot of people who read these texts tend to do is they tend to fetishize the heretic. They don't kind of think that these are just normal people like you and me living their day-to-day lives and they just happen to, you know, think Seth and Jesus are incarnations of the same kind of, you know, figure. But they're still doing the equivalent of washing their cars that where Guats would say, you know, every day, getting up, going to work and interacting with people. We need to understand that these are flesh and blood people. So, you know, with Zeke's work, how much of his thought on Plotinus and Plotinus' encounters and how much he took from Gnostic mysticism, do you think agrees with where you are? Where does it diverge? I don't know if you could just briefly talk about it. Well, like I said on the other interview we did, Zeke and I were close friends and in regular contact when we were writing our books. And, you know, I was in New Haven. He was up in Boston and we'd see each other every couple of months. I mean, we spent a lot of time together and I enjoyed really terrific hospitality at his places with his wife Sasha. I miss him. The best thing that can happen to you if you're working on a scholarly subject is to have a friend who's working on a similar thing who you disagree with and with whom you can bat around ideas all night. You know, nothing will make you sharper and we batted around a lot of ideas together. Back then it was pretty cool. What Zeke was doing with Plotinus was pretty different than what I was doing. He was well on his way when I met him. So when I first came into his orbit he had already begun his dissertation on Plotinus. And he wanted to ground Plotinus in the world of late ancient esotericism as I would call it today. Not just narcissism, but like you described this more common milieu in late ancient Egypt where alchemy, magic, narcissism, theosophy all kind of run together as a what the historian Garth Fowden called the pagan intellectual milieu of the period. Yeah. And he wanted to ground Plotinus' mysticism against that more esoteric intellectual background, especially with regards to specific practices that are used to elicit mystical experience. For Plotinus' descriptions of mystical experience which he says are the most important experiences he had in his life, okay? He clearly describes them in vivid terms as having taken place following particular and meditative practices in which he has engaged. And Zeke was looking for the source of these practices, not in India as previous scholars had done trying to draw parallels between the Upanishads and the Anayads, but in magic from the Greek magical papyri and then the Gnostic texts preserved at Naqamadi, specifically the Platonizing Sethian texts whose names are shared with the apocalypses mentioned by Porphyry in the life of Plotinus. Zeke thought in these Coptic texts we may have the sources for Plotinus' mysticism and thus the cornerstone of Plotinus' philosophy. So when I met Zeke, he was already very deep into this research and I thought, okay, well, I'm not going to, I don't want to do the same thing. And I also had some of my own ideas. I was already very into the Zinachic stuff and I smelled that there was also some real differences between Plotinus and these Gnostic texts that I wanted to spell out. And so what I ultimately tried to do was write something that could sit on the shelf next to Zeke's book and his book could sit on the shelf next to my book. And they would tell two different stories, two stories going in different directions and they may not be going to the same place, but they definitely could have formed one another. So where I really agree with Zeke's work and with a team of scholars, I edited his dissertation and guided it to publication in the top series for the field non-commonian mannequin studies at the Dutch publisher Brill here in the Netherlands. So I've worked through that book and done a lot to put it out there and I agree with a lot of it. Having worked through it and edited it, I actually came away more convinced than I buy by his work than I was when I started. What I think Zeke does so well is he offers a very convincing reading of Plotinus and Plotinus' mysticism and spells out in very close detail all of the parallels between different passages in the Ineans and then passages in the Coptic Gnostic Corpus where it's clear they're coming from a shared intellectual milieu of some kind. And there are also parallels from the Greek magical papyri that are very interesting as well. Where I'm not entirely convinced is the direction of influence. Zeke assumes that these Coptic Gnostic texts must provide a window as to the situation of philosophy in Alexandria, I should say Egypt more generally in the early third century when Plotinus is starting out, right? But these texts we only have in Coptic manuscripts of the mid to late fourth century. So there's a gap there of 100, 150 years between when Plotinus read Greek versions of the stuff and the Coptic versions that we have that have been translated at least once, perhaps multiple times, okay? And this gap is significant. Some scholars think this gap is not significant. We should take the shared titles, the Nod Kamadi texts and Porphyry's life of Plotinus and say, eh, it must be about the same stuff. Or throughout the word of caution, but then treat the Coptic material from Nod Kamadi as if we had Plotinus's sources in front of us. And I would advocate that we'd be much more careful. Let's go step by step. Which aspects of these texts can we show that Plotinus must have known which aspects could have been added later? And indeed, there have been many scholars who argued against the work of John Turner and Sik Mesur that what we have in these Coptic texts from Nod Kamadi are revisions of the texts known to Plotinus, making use of the philosophy of Plotinus, Porphyry, or even Iambicus. And I've argued this myself for the case of Aloe Guinness from Nod Kamadi, the codex 11, the negative theology of Aloe Guinness doesn't look anything like a negative theology that we have in Plotinus. It looks a lot like the kind of negative theology that we have in Proclus from the 5th century. And Proclus we all know was following Iambicus in his more structure, his philosophical structure. And so I placed the Aloe Guinness that we have as post-Iambician. And not the same as the version of the Plotinus knew. And if it were, it would be so state of the art that nobody looked at it for 150 years. Right. It just doesn't fit in the early 3rd century. But that's for what we can imagine for the mid 4th century quite well, which is when we happen to have the manuscript, right? Absolutely. Yeah, so this is where I would really differ from Sik's work. But it's a marvelous book. And if you want to know Plotinus and the Gnostic, it's not with respect to culture wars or debates about incarnations of Seth or the Providence and the end of the world, that's what I wrote about. If you want to get at the mystical stuff, what they share in common, right? What does the world of forms look like up there that they're talking about? There's no better guide to this than Sik Mesur. Yeah, I'm going through his book. I haven't finished it, but I've got it through a couple of chapters. And it's just, like you said, a marvelous text, very rich. I can see the parallels that you're talking about and how your book and his book compliment each other. To Sik's credit, I do think that he was going in a good direction because you see that in Yamblichus, right? Yamblichus is really trying to meld all these things together, but also kind of contra that. Yamblichus is also speaking against porphyry and platinus, right? He's like, he's kind of like creating this theurgical kind of way of doing neoplatinism versus the contemplative stuff that went before. And this is something I talked to, again, Edward Watts about when we were talking about Hepatia, how Hepatia was more a Platinian kind of neoplatinist in terms of that contemplative ascent and mysticism versus the Yamblichian theological stuff that was kind of in vogue at the time. Very interesting, yeah. So I just, I love this stuff, but I love how both of your works just really take it all out of kind of creating these false kind of either or situations and putting everybody in the same kind of pool and just saying, hey, they're all swimming together in the same equals. They're all swimming together. Yeah, exactly. They're all talking, they're going to the same clubs, you know? Yeah, I just love that. And this is something that I really tried to emphasize in my book is that in the mid third century, it's clear that these individuals were talking to one another and circulating texts among one another. And what's fascinating is how porous the boundaries between magic, religion, Christianity, neoplatinism, Gnosticism in this period really were. And I think the part of what's so remarkable about Platinus's encounter with the Gnostics is that it's there that we see one of those walls start to go up when he draws a line in the sand. These people don't share the values of the second sophistic. They don't share the values of philosophical tradition. As I understand it, I think in that line that he draws with the Gnostics, we begin to take a step on the road that the story of neoplatinism took for the next several hundred years where increasingly Greek philosophers identified themselves as Helenes, they call themselves Greeks Helenes. And we often translate this as pagans, that is non-Christians, people not participating in what becomes the Christian culture of the empire after Constantine, right? And in turn, Christian philosophers, they're not calling themselves Christian philosophers, they're calling themselves theologians. The differentiation of the two books of philosophy and theology, I think in some ways begins with Platinus and the Gnostics. But before that, it's a big potpourri, a really exciting party where all this stuff is coming together and being exchanged. Total Floralegium, sentences of Sextus all over again, right? You can have porpore using that and then you could have somebody in Nag Hammadi using the same kind of source for vastly different reasons. So Dr. Burns, this has just been like a wild ride. It's been an honor. I have one final question for you if you have time. Sure. I was just wondering, since writing Apocalypse, you've mentioned at times that your mind has changed on certain things. I was wondering if you could just briefly go into what has changed for you and your thought as far as like some of the theses in the book that you posited? I think there are a couple of things. First of all, when I go back and look at the book, I don't feel terrible about it. I don't like to look at my own writing. I hate it. I think a lot of creatives feel that way about their stuff and that's definitely the case with me. But every once in a while, I have to go look at it and I think, okay, this looks all right. I do feel that when I look at the book, but there are some things I look at differently. I did 10 years ago when I was finishing Apocalypse. I mean, I wrote it a long time ago. One is at that, back then in the conclusion of the book, I brought up a hypothetical history of the Sethians, the Sethian group. And I did this through tracing what we know about the history of the various Sethian texts and how they relate to Christianity, Manichaeism and other movements of late antiquity. And looking back at that today, it reminds me a lot of what John Turner was doing. I think I was kind of giving an alternative version of what Turner does in his book, Sethianostasis and the Platonic tradition. And I don't think I would even bother with that now. There's so little we can say about who the Sethians were and all we have are the texts. We're not even sure if there was a Sethian community. Porphyry does not call these books Sethians. We don't even know that there is a group of people in Plotinus the Circle circulating these books. We only know that Plotinus the Circle had these texts, which is something on which Mazor himself corrected me. Lots of people assume that the circulation of the books in Plotinus the Circle means that there are representatives, Christian representatives in Plotinus the Circle holding the books saying, I read this. And it's not what Porphyry says, he just says the books were there. There are Christians in Rome, okay. And these are probably the Gnostics and there are the books in Plotinus the Circle, but they don't necessarily come together to Plotinus the Circle, you know. So since writing Apocalypse, I became more careful and simply tried to write about Sethian literary tradition. We have these texts and there's a literary tradition in them and the people who espouse this literature seem to have engaged in biblical cultures, much like the Elkicites and the Manichaeans, these groups from the borderlines of Judaism and Christianity. But at the same time, the manuscripts that we have from Dr. Mani, they're Christian productions and Porphyry identifies the individuals in Rome circulating these texts, okay, the possession of these texts as being Christians as well. And so there's obviously a proximity to Christianity here. And I wonder if Sethian Gnosticism is more of a subculture, kind of a Biblical-sizing alternative subculture that some Christians were into and maybe some people who were not necessarily Christians, but belonging to other Biblical-sizing movements of the period were into. We don't necessarily have to see the Sethians as a group or an alternative church as much as a subculture. I think a subcultural model fits them pretty well. And that was something I developed in the years after writing Apocalypse, but I think it would be a more useful model for understanding who was actually producing this stuff than hypothesizing, providing another hypothesis as to the history of the Sethian group. Amazing, yeah, I love that because what came to my mind, I'm really into music, so it's kind of like when you say the dark music scene, like is everybody in the dark music scene into the same kind of music? So you could think of the Sethians almost as like, these are the people into the industrial stuff versus the people who are into the goth stuff versus, but it's all dark, right? It's all coming into the same. Yeah, so. Exactly, and some of them were Christians. Go to a Slayer concert, lots of Christians. Right. Half the band is Christian, you know, but they're still in the Slayer. And that's, it's a subculture. It's a subculture with its own images and sublanguage and the Sethian literary tradition, this way it's a lot like Slayer. Amazing. So I don't think we could edit on a better quote than that. So yeah, Sethians are like Slayer. So Dr. Burns, this has been an honor. This has been incredible. Learned so much just in the past hour and a half. If you want to plug anything, feel free. This is your time to kind of discuss whatever you have out there. Apocalypse of the Alien God is still available through all the channels through which you can purchase books. Did God Care from Brill will be published in softcover later this year? I believe in August. And the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Nagtamari Codesies, also from Brill is available for free for download as through open access license. Amazing. Thank you so much, Dr. Burns. You have a pleasant evening. Thank you, every one of you for watching, for supporting, for watching the videos. I am floored that people would watch a dumb guy sitting on a couch talking to people completely out of his league about stuff that he has no business talking about. But I love it and I love that you people have watched and supported and thank you to all the scholars and especially you, Dr. Burns, for being so generous with your time. Thank you, Jason. And I'd also like to thank your viewers for tuning in. Awesome, thank you. And y'all have a pleasant tomorrow. We'll see you soon.