Gnoesis Core Teachings
A creative philosophy for liviing in a difficult and chaotic time.
Craig Chalquist, PhD, PhD
2026
When the light of Sophia had mixed with the darkness, it caused the darkness to shine. – The Apocryphon of John
Turn the gold into silver.
– Ibn Umail (Senior Zadith), Book of the Explanation of the Symbols
This is an expository style you are more familiar with, Doctor, than I am. Mine tends to be a philosophy of song and enactment. But you are right about all the overlaps. I also see your Ten Lamps shining in some of this Gnoesis material as well as attempts toward a Terrania Charter. Thank you for sharing this with me.
–Mariam Najjar to Simeon Mackenzie, personal correspondence
We live on a beautiful blue planet circling through a cosmos of unfolding creativity. Our very existence is a perpetual miracle, yet we are too busy to notice, fighting each other while allowing our homeworld to be wrecked all around us. The future looks increasingly like an abandoned Southern California strip mall surrounded by a melting parking lot.
Reimagining our guiding stories can make a path into the Great Conversation of presences all around us, reconnect us to ourselves and one another, help us mature into our full humanness, and light a lamp in a shadowy time of painful planetary transformation. Gnoesis ("know-AY-sis") is crafted to assist with these urgent developmental tasks.
Gnoesis is a psychology-minded depth philosophy that wields imagination to restory us into an animate world not of objects, but of presences. Gnoesis partners with the imaginal to appreciate and interpret the symbols living all around us. We call this partnership worldreading. Everything speaks!
We don't need another elaborate system or hierarchy of abstractions. Instead, Gnoesis reimagines and restories as lived creative activities.
"Gnoesis" combines three words. Gnosis means deep understanding and seeing through, as when we suddenly grasp the message in a dream. Gnosis is also a form of discernment: seeing through illusions other people take for realities. Noetic means rooted in mind or mentality, but its wider meaning refers to consciousness and its potentialities. Mythopoesis means mythmaking. Our time requires new myths: new guiding stories for a new planetary worldview. Blaming and dooming get us nowhere. We need guiding fictions and lore that uplift, inspire, and reconnect us.
Gnoesis can be called Lamplight when used as an ecospiritual path (see my Lamplighter Trilogy). (Lamplight was known in the past as Terragnosis until a Canadian ibogaine company seized the word and trademarked it.) The practice of lamplighting (lower case "l") finds inspiring visions (some from fictions), dreams, ideals for assembling expanded stories: a new cycle of guiding lore with larger possibilities poised at the edges of culture and consciousness. Lamplighting supplements the yang of activism and reform with a yin of reflective mentoring. Think of that as a kind of therapy for ailing worldviews.
How we treat one another depends on how we perceive the world. In a time when flagrant psychological warfare waged from above is now the norm, Gnoesis opposes this sorcery with reenchantment. We vision together for kinder, more mature, and more expansive ways to live with each other. We play to help ourselves and each other grow up.
Results of Gnoesis include inspiration, awe, creative passion, liberation from common nonsense, a new feeling of purpose, and reentry into the great conversation with earthly things all around us as we walk a path of earthly reenchantment.
Creating and dreaming together offers an alternative to warring on each other, clinging to absolutist ideologies, succumbing to crass materialism, or lapsing into mute helplessness. Instead, we gather to imagine and work toward what a responsible, social, worldreading, full spectrum human being would be like, and the kind of society such people would feel at home in.
Where does Gnoesis come from?
Although forms of gnosis have been cultivated in all times and places, a strong variety of it grew in ancient Egypt. Nourished by a rich potting mixture of Egyptian, Greek, Jewish, Persian, and possibly Indian cultural influences, this Silver Tree blossomed as it rooted itself in Alexandria and sent its branches outward.
At first, the Tree took esoteric form, emphasizing sacred experience felt in the depths of consciousness. Outer and inner events were held as symbols full of meaning; myths, stories, images, and metaphors were prized above absolutist belief as carriers of transformative knowledge. Imagination was not just an add-on to consciousness, but a realm of existence populated by figures and characters and archetypes with their own kind of intangible but potent reality and agency.
The Silver Tree is not a literal perennial tradition passed from master to apprentice, although Tree-watering mentors were always at hand. Rather, the movement we are considering runs more like a steady, informal flow of students, adepts and communities spread across the ages, spontaneously resurfacing here and there, ducking underground for a while, persisting, transmuting, waiting, and resurfacing again. It is not an august Catena Aurea, then, no Golden Chain of secret adepts in a straight and literal lineage, but an Arbor Argentum, a Silver Tree of inspiration waiting in cultural moonlight for opportunities to reenchant.
As I explained in Restorying Our Lore:
If we indulge the fantasy that the Silver Tree is a living being, an animate network that adapts while preserving its essence, we glimpse its emergence long ago in Africa, Australia, Asia, and the Indigenous Americas, mediated by shamans and the kinds of artists who left petroglyphs of animals, handprints, and the elements. Its branches shine in the Upanishads (sixth to seventh century BCE) composed by countercultural rishis (seers); in the mysteries of the lyric philosopher-god Orpheus (sixth century BCE); in Pythagoras and the pre-Socratic philosophers who wrote about matter as intelligible (around 600 BCE); in Hermeticism and Gnosticism; and in Aesara of Lucania (fourth century BCE), an early psychologist whose Book on Human Nature described a soul composed of spirit, mind, and desire, perhaps influencing Plato and even Freud.
For the most part, the Tree is not found along wide paths, although we may spot it in Taoism, schools of Vedanta and Buddhism that take matter as ensouled, the nature spirits of Shinto, and, later, the indwelling divine Presence studied in Kabbalah. Neoplatonism (third century CE) described an Anima Mundi or Soul of the World. In Northern Europe, druids practiced their version of nature gnosis until the Romans decimated them and the missionaries of the Cross suppressed those who would not convert. Curanderas and plant medicine experts practice in South and Central America to this day. The silver impulse returned in European movements like Romanticism (seventeenth century) and its German offspring Naturphilosophie. By 1910, it was calling a branch of itself depth psychology—especially that of Jung, who mixed in plentiful amounts of Gnosticism, Neoplatonism, and Hermeticism.
Now and then the Tree seems to flourish specific locales. Leaders throughout the ancient world prized the utterances of the Oracle at Delphi (1400 BCE to sixth century CE). Ile-Ife in what is now Osun State in Nigeria was known not only for its superb stone, bronze, and terracotta sculptures, but, since at least 500 BCE, for its oracles, spiritual celebrations, and dream enactments of the lively doings of the Orishas, naturalistic deities who resided there before fanning out during the African Diaspora. Around that time the Jixia Academy rose in Shandong, China, to foster Confucian, mystical Taoist, naturalist (yin–yang, five elements) and cosmological scholarship. The Academy also published the Tao Te Ching. In 762, the Abbasids founded the House of Wisdom in Baghdad. Perhaps the earliest of such locales were the Egyptian Houses of Life: scriptoria and lore repositories attached to the temple complexes.
The gleam flickers through the lives of silvery individuals as well, including Khana, poet and astrologer (ninth to twelfth century CE); Muhammad ibn Umail (“Senior”), Hermetic, writer, alchemist; Abu Muhammad ibn Arabi, Sufi poet and philosopher; Marsilio Ficino, priest and Hermetic philosopher; Paracelsus, physician and alchemist; Giordano Bruno, friar, mathematician, and philosopher; Jakob Boehme, theologian, writer, and philosopher; Margaret Cavendish, polymath, philosopher, novelist; Wolfgang Goethe, polymath and alchemical poet; William Blake, artist and mystic; Samuel Taylor Coleridge, poet and philosopher; Gustav Fechner, scientist and nature gnostic; Ralph Waldo Emerson, poet and essayist; C. G. Jung, psychiatrist and depth psychologist; Hermann Hesse, writer and poet; Christiana Morgan, artist, writer, psychological researcher; Henry Corbin, scholar, theologian, professor; Jane Hollister Wheelwright, writer and Jungian analyst; Lucille Clifton, poet and teacher; and many other creative visionaries.
Developing different sides of itself—shamanic, gnostic, alchemical, Romantic, Transcendentalist, psychological, terrapsychological, ecospiritual—the Silver Tree has increased in scope, reach, and luster. Its friends, who are as diverse as their humanity, live in a world of animate presences. Its direction tends toward new possibilities for finding the sacred in the earthly. It follows no dogma; its ethic is one of communal and ecological care. It replaces oughts and shoulds with the mythopoesis of storytelling.
Whether Gnoesis will grow to be the latest branch on the Silver Tree of gnosis is history's call. Meanwhile, below is an outline of my own contributions so far.
The primary method or means I have used for growing Gnoesis is loreology, the multidisciplinary study and craft of how we imaginatively shape fictions and lore into the stories we navigate by. Loreology uses a variety of resources to detect the literalisms in our lore—the places where we get stuck in our guiding stories—and melt them down into new loreways: storied paths that express higher values and meaningful practices of life and work. On a large scale, restoried narratives of domination, power, and control can give way to those of care, collaboration, and planetary interdependency: an experiment awaiting fulfillment.
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Our usual way of making keystone stories Making them more consciously
Imagiknowing, a contemporary term for gnosis, blends imagination, intuition, and a post-literal sense for symbolism wherever it occurs. Imagiknowing draws on traditions of imagination as a form of deep knowledge.
Loreologizing is central to:
• Lamplighting, as mentioned above. One kind of lamplighting is enchantivism: telling, performing, and depicting the kinds of futures we wish to inhabit to move beyond argument into inspiration and collective dreaming.
• Applied Folklore: exploring the mythic and archetypal motifs in current events, organizational life, family dynamics, and personal myth and vocation.
• Planetary Mythologizing: creating a set of fictional tales and perhaps rituals, celebrations, and performances for our time. We need a new mythology grown from the ground up by artists and storytellers.
• Terrapsychology: the study of how the things of the world—not only rivers and mountains and the elements, but roadways and buildings and machinery—live inside the human psyche as moods, complexes, conflicts, and dream figures.
• The Way of the Sage for leaders, mentors, healers, and teachers seeking practical and imaginative wisdom—Pronoian wisdom—for new approaches.
• Ecospirituality: also known as nature spirituality, the baseline spiritual orientation of humanity. (Linda Buzzell and I are writing a book on our own versions.)
I also rely on speculative fiction to show the underside of contemporary problems and how we might creatively outgrow them. My Assembling Terrania Cycle of hopeful near-future fiction consists of these eight books:
NOVELS:
The Lamplighter Trilogy: Soulmapper, Heartlander, and Lamplighter.
STORY COLLECTIONS:
Tales of Terrania Rising, A Chorus of Resistance, and Dreamvale Tributes. The fourth story collection (2026) is three novelettes bundled into A Trio of Outliers.
ILLUSTRATED:
The forthcoming Book of Beginnings by Mariam Najjar will be illustrated by Carmen Sorrenti. This Book will lay out Gnoesis through aphorisms and reflections.
The Cycle also includes the Ten Lamps philosophy, a set of cosmic operating principles written down by Simeon Mackenzie; the Terrania Charter to bring a planetary government of peace and mature governance into being once the Colorful Riots send authoritarians into hiding; some references to heartsteading to create community; a regenerative practice called the Seven Roots; and a Transdaimonic League of visionaries founded to help human beings disidentify with the Powers: thirty archetypal entity-principles who behave like sentient natural forces. This might sound arcane until we come across someone so addicted to Justice that their humanity suffers, or a guru stuck in the Redeemer role, or a codependent who can't stop identifying with the Heroine or Hero, or a raging politician stuck to Mars.
Another aid to the struggle toward human maturity is the Dreamvale Exchange founded to foster contact with the imaginal realm of existence. Conscious conversation with figures of fantasy allows us to choose which imaginings to realize and which to outgrow. Palestinian immigrant Mariam Najjar's imaginings lead to the founding of Lamplight as a post-patriarchal, non hierarchical religion of imagination, story, play, inspiration, and care.
Some living in Terrania, which is not utopia but is a good society, are not religious. Others are Outliers who live on the fringes of civilization. Terrania is not perfect, but it learns, in part by valuing difference.
Emblem: a Silver Tree with six roots and seven branches bearing gold fruit.
Ethics: 5-Fold Caring for self, each other, Earth and its creatures, story, and possibility.
Goal/vision: Terrania, which we can't reach unless we grow up enough as a species to get unstuck from our gods, including the ones we don't acknowledge as such: Power, Authority, Money, Status, Fame, Domination and Control. (Ancient Gnostics referred to such collective complexes as Archons, or "Authorities of Darkness.")
Lineage: the Silver Tree of the gnosis of imagination. Hermetic and gnostic.
Main methodologies: imagiknowing, loreologizing, Terrapsychological Inquiry, creativity and the arts, and play.
Modes of change-making: lamplighting (including enchantivism), transrevolution, storytelling, dreaming the myth onward by giving it a modern dress (Jung). An example of that dreaming: in the past, Egyptian myth spoke of Ma'at, goddess of universal connections. Jung recast this as synchronicity. Today, we might take a leaf from Star Trek's script and say: IDIC (Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations).
Modes of rhetoric: comic and romantic (inspiration, play, eros, improvisation, humor) rather than tragic (heroic).
Mood: Why do we think a meaningful life path must always be set in stone? That bringing good change can’t be enjoyable? What if it has to be? Imagine a philosophy for life and action that would be performative, not prescriptive; creative, not creedal; visionary, not missionary. Grounded, imaginative, and informed by dreams (not doctrines), stories, and the power of play.
Nature practices: Earthdreaming, TI, ecotherapy, nature-based somatics, and many others.
Ontology and epistemology: participatory, intersubjective animism (see Terrapsychological Inquiry), process orientation, gnosis of imagination, fiction as lore, creative diversity as a primal nature of the cosmos. In fiction, the Ten Lamps within a Tetraverse (Source; Infrarealm of archetypal forms; Dreamvale; and Coaguum, the material world where we live).
Spirituality: love and awe for greater-than-human presences not necessarily supernatural. In this context, “spiritual” means making conscious connection with Something trans-human experienced as immanent and sacred. Not Something entirely supernatural, but bound up in the wisdom of nature and cosmos. Daily practice of terragnostic reverence means engaging in continual conscious conversation with:
• oneself, including moods, responses, thoughts, feelings, health, sensorium, being fully present;
• the unconscious, as amplified by dream work, free associations, somatic states, fantasies, and active imagination;
• each other, speaking and listening from the heart, watching our projections, and using imagination to empathize and respond;
• folkloric images, plots and motifs that recur in dreams, complexes, current events; • plants, animals, all the nonhuman beings who share our planet;
• the world, including lands and waters, elements and skies, winds and weathers and cycles, and even matter, including the everyday “inanimate” objects with which we surround ourselves.
• Through all these dimensions of attention pulses the cyclical nature of time: birth and aging and death, developmental stages and rites of passage, seasons, climate, movements of the stars and planets.
Values: care, openness, wonder, play, empathy, creativity, integrity, courage, generosity, love.
Moving from actuality to possibility, Gnoesists ask: What can we make together? What visions, what imaginings, await realization?
As Mariam Najjar likes to say: "Dream it so."
