The Elect Soul Is Punished Through Martyrdom

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Secret Doctrine's Second Proposition Series · 5 pages

Five pages from the Commentary on the Pistis Sophia in Blavatsky Collected Writings volume XIII, under the running heading "martyrdom versus purification." A passage of the Gnostic text is printed first with numbered markers, and the commentary follows.

The quoted passage describes souls cleansed not of themselves but of compulsion, according to the regulation of the Ineffable, who have not undergone sufferings or changes in the regions, nor flayed themselves, nor poured themselves into different bodies. Most of the commentary turns on that last phrase, and the point is philological. Metagizein means to pour from one vessel into another, and metagismos was the technical term for metempsychosis or reincarnation among the Pythagoreans. C.W. King is charged with translating the passage as "nor transformed themselves into various figures" — an error, on this account, because sōmata are animal bodies and nothing else, and because both terms are technical ones used only in connection with rebirth and frequently employed for it in the Pistis Sophia by Schwartze. The judgement is delivered dryly: it is difficult to understand how the author of The Gnostics and their Remains missed the correct translation. A supporting note records that Augustine, copying Philaster, gives the name Metangismonitæ to a sect of heretics who asserted that the Son was in the Father as one vessel within another, with the caution that there is no evidence to support the statement. The file closes on a larger regret and an implicit invitation — that the many striking and instructive passages on reincarnation in the writings of the Gnostic heresiarchs have yet to be collected — with an example taken from Clement of Alexandria quoting Basilides.

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