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L’epica mancata. Appunti di biopolitica gnostica

Summary: The Homeric epos is an opportunity given to Gnosticism to tell the tragic history of the Soul, confined in the cosmos. Odysseus is a Redeemer to reach the gate of heaven. This fact is probably linked with the story of Telegonus, that travelling in search of his father Odysseus, kills him. Telegonus, on learning of his mistake, brings his father’s body, along with Penelope and Telemachus, to the island of his mother, where Circe makes them immortal. To achieve these levels of awareness and ≪see≫ the flashes of another reality, the Gnostics are helped by psychoactive drugs, the vehicle towards a new state of consciousness. A tool that was part of their visionary biopolitical strategy. The ancient Gnostics realized at an early time that theurgy and archaic mythology, so favourable to the cosmos and optimism, would cause a derive of reification and would reduce epics and mythology to mere objects of social control and mental health. Gnostic biopolitics seem therefore to react against a power which permeates all bodies and minds, as it appears in some theurgical Neoplatonism. The biopolical power expresses itself through a control that reaches the depths of consciences and bodies, and, at the same time, the totality of social relations. To this mechanism the Gnostics would appear to desire to rebel, reinterpreting epics and mythology through a new, changed paradigm, the reified world of bodies, objects with no sense of reality and truth, namely God, the true light blessed by God that lives in a distant and unknown dimension.