"Both ways are daughters of God, do not forget that. But fire was born first and Love afterward. Let us begin first with Fire." John the Baptist (Kazantazakis 243)
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In the book also, woman represents a hindrance to attaining the fullness of experience and dedication to Yahweh, an extreme asceticism only subliminal in the standard gospels and epistles but forefront and directly expressed in the writing of the Gnostics.
The woman in the hovel prognosticates the end temptation Jesus faces, the impulse to domesticity and a life of accepting pleasures in a holy way, a more moderate stance closer to that of traditional Christianity.
In the end, the only redemption for women is through Satan. Woman is a large part of the final temptation Jesus must reject in his quest to crucify the flesh. Mary Magdaline, xxxx, the little girl who turns out to be Satan, all play an intricate in duping Jesus off the cross and into a life of contentment and marital bliss. In an eerie way, Satan's statement of "All women are one" remains true even to the end: women are a distraction, a sexual and domestic pull dangerous to any true seeker of experience of God, and must ultimately be rejected.
Staley and Walsh reject a gnostic worldview present in The Last Temptation of Christ. However, their rejection of this influence is based on two fallacies: one, that Gnosticism can be reduced to its rejection of flesh in light of the spirit and, two, that the world Jesus inhabits is actually Ed In Temptation, as Jesus walks away from the cross, the crowd are left blithe fully ignorant and still cheering at a Jesus they think, or so it seems, is still left on the cross. In the Gnostic Scriptures, many gospels have the crowds also duped, standing watching while the real Christ, the aeon son of man, stands by laughing at their ignorance. And while in Scorsese's film, no one replaces Jesuus on the cross, the basic element remains the same: in the end, Jesus was not crucified, but rather taken away, an simukacrum left in order to trick the crowds, leading to today's overwhelming belief (and that of the synoptic gospels') that Jesus was, in fact, killed. |
AuthorWill's Brainstorming Blog for his 2014-15 Essay Collection on World Religions in Film Archives
March 2015
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