Information about this publication:
La posterità di IAO

Summary: The article explores some aspects of Gnostic syncretism in the light of an epigraph from Athens, called the “Magic Sphere”, which, until recently, has been ignored. From the reconstruction and interpretation of the words and images scattered on the surface of this “Magic Sphere”, there are ideas and suggestions from mystery cults and theurgy, that create a version of Gnosticism that is somewhere between the ancient Mediterranean world and the Near East. These concepts contain a deeper insight into Gnosticism that can be attributed to “culture” in its narrow definition as found in modern anthropological thought. This insight presupposes a system of symbolic references, where cosmological and anthropological elements define events of the Enlightened Soul, the struggle with fate, and the beginner’s path to the pleromatic salvation, i.e. the exit from the “archontic” cosmos and the return to the Kingdom of Light.