Elaine Pagels, the classical and biblical scholar who was among the first to translate and interpret the Nag Hammadi manuscripts writes in her 2019 book Why Religion? A Personal Story that she tried LSD shortly before feeling impelled to write her bestseller The Gnostic Gospels (1979). Gnosis, the direct experience of God, is something often powerfully enhanced by entheogens like LSD.
Pagels grew up in Palo Alto, the child of academic parents (who were horrified by her dabblings into religion as a child). She had an early fascination with the trippy Gospel of John, which was also Emily Dickinson's favorite Bible book. In high school, she hung out with a group of artists, and writes that she knew the (years older) Jerry Garcia, and attended his first wedding (to a very pregnant young woman). In high school, he dated Garcia's friend Paul Speegle, who died in a car crash that Jerry, also in the car, survived, and she surmises that the name The Grateful Dead “must have resonated from the crash he’d survived five years earlier.” The car crash also caused her to leave her new-found religion when born again Christains told her her Jewish friend would burn in hell.
“Many of us, of course, have left religious institutions behind, and prefer to identify as ‘spiritual, not religious,’” she writes at the outset of Why Religion? “I’ve done both – had faith, lost it; joined groups, and left them....What matters to me more than whether we participate in institutions or leave them is how we engage the imagination – in dreams, art, poetry, music – since what each of us needs, and what we can engage, obviously differs and changes throughout our lifetime.”
After graduating Stanford, Pagels applied to a Harvard doctoral program in the study of religion, and was rejected by Prof. Krister Stendahl because, he wrote, “women students have always quit before receiving a degree.” However she was encouraged to apply again the following year if she was “still serious," and after completing a Masters in classics at Stanford and continuing to study advanced Greek and Latin, she re-applied and was accepted. There she studied the “secret” gnostic gospels discovered at Nag Hammadi in 1945, written in Coptic around the 2nd - 4th century AD.
Her husband Heinz, a physicist and author of The Cosmic Code who was interested in consciousness, took part in an LSD experiment at Palo Alto Veteran's Hospital while in graduate school. What he took "wasn't a placebo," he told Elaine later, "saying how astonished he was to see stars and galaxies being born and dying, while others emerged, through what felt like innumerable ages." The summer they married (1969), he encouraged his new wife to try it, "promising to cope with any difficulty that might arise."
Pagels writes she "anticipated that what would happen might involve what I was writing about, some kind of Christian vision. Instead, as I sat in the apartment, looking out at the sky, the trees in light wind, and the garden, I saw everything alive as fire, gloriously intertwined. Watching, ecstatic and speechless, for about five hours, I finally managed to say, 'I guess that solved the dying problem.' What horrified me before, when [her high school friend] Paul died—that a beloved person could simply disappear, and disintegrate—now seemed to resolve into a deeper unity of the whole."
That fall, she returned to Cambridge to complete her dissertation and doctoral exams, graduating with distinction. She began to teach, writing two "scholarly books" and several articles, and working with a group of nearly 30 scholars to translate, edit and publish more than 50 texts from Nag Hammadi. Concern that their work wouldn't be understood by the public led her to write The Gnostic Gospels, a less academic and more approachable text.
One of the first to read the long-lost Gospel of Thomas, Pagels noticed that rather than focusing on Jesus's divinity, the teachings there encourage his followers to find the divine in themselves. “If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you,” saying 70 says.
In 1970 she began teaching at Barnard College (a women's school). Asked to speak at a conference there about women in the early Christian movement, she realized she'd been taught nothing about that. "While thinking about the conference, I suddenly realized that although the sources in the New Testament often marginalize women and minimize their roles, the secret gospels and other texts found in Egypt—some, especially—abound in feminine images, even for God," she wrote. "None of my male colleagues had noticed this, and I hadn't either, until I had been asked to confront the question."
"The Secret Revelation of John, for example, opens as the disciple John, devastated by Jesus's death, goes out in to the desert alone to grieve, when suddenly 'the whole creation shone with light, and the world was shaken.' Terrified, John says be heard Jesus's voice speaking from that light, saying, 'John, John, why do you weep? Don't you know that I am with you always; I am the Father; I am the Mother; and I am the Son!"
Pagels writes that anyone reading the Bible in Hebrew would see that the words "spirit" (Ruah) and "wisdom" (Hokmah) are feminine, but that when translated to Greek and Latin, Ruah became the genderless pneuma and spiritus, losing connection with the divine Mother. "I realized that Israel's god was an anomaly—a single-male god, who, unlike other male gods among his contemporaries, had no feminine partner, as in Egypt, where Isis and Hathor were worshipped along with Ra and Horus, or in Greece or Rome, where Zeus and Jupiter were paired with divine wives, sisters, and lovers, like Hera and Juno."
“I feel like it sort of just opens some windows on a tradition that had seemed pretty much closed and sort of codified a long time ago, like, these are the correct ways to understand God, as a father, as a son,” Pagels says about the lost images. “And now people say, ‘Oh, well, there’s many different ways of thinking about this. And for me that is like a window opening up, bringing fresh air and more light.”
To some, this was heresy (a word she traces back to the Greek for "choice"). “You know, people have sometimes called me ‘Elaine Pagan,’” she smilingly told the Christian Science Monitor. She told Stanford Magazine she identifies as Christian—“but I wouldn’t say I identify only with that.” She often speaks at events at her Episcopal parish, where, the Rev. Leslie Smith says, “She clearly challenges a congregation that’s fairly progressive, on issues like the early church’s repression of women’s participation.”
The Gnostic Gospels won both the National Book Award in the category Religion/Inspiration and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Modern Library named it as one of the 100 best nonfiction books of the twentieth century. Pagels went on to write books like, Adam, Eve, and the Serpent: Sex and Politics in Early Christianity and Revelations: Visions, Prophecy, and Politics in the Book of Revelation.
Re-Examining Eve
"Even the mystics of Jewish and Christian tradition who seek to find their identity in God often are careful to acknowledge the abyss that separates them from their divine Source," Pagels writes in Adam, Eve and the Serpent. When the Dominican monk Meister Eckhart (c. 1260–1328 C.E.) wrote of striving to attain “God [who] lies hidden in the soul’s core," the archbishop of Cologne obtained a papal bull condemning Eckhart’s writings as heresy.
"But gnostic interpreters share with the Hindu and with Eckhart that very conviction—that the divine being is hidden deep within human nature, as well as outside it," Pagels writes. According to Ptolemy, the story of Adam and Eve "shows that humanity 'fell' into ordinary consciousness and lost contact with its divine origin."
Pagels recaunts that many gnostics read the story of Adam and Eve as an inner battle between the psyche (ordinary consciousness) and the spirit (the potential for a higher, spiritual consciousness), and that:
The majority of the known gnostic texts depict Adam (not Eve) as representing the psyche, while Eve represents the higher principle, the spiritual self. Gnostic authors loved to tell, with many variations, the story of Eve, that elusive spiritual intelligence: how she first emerged within Adam and awakened him, the soul, to awareness of its spiritual nature; how she encountered resistance, was misunderstood, attacked, and mistaken for what she was not; and how she finally joined with Adam “in marriage,” so to speak, and so came to live in harmonious union with the soul.
According to the gnostic text called Reality of the Rulers, when Adam first recognized Eve, he saw in her not a mere marital partner but a spiritual power:
And when he saw her, he said, “It is you who have given me life: you shall be called Mother of the Living [Eve]; for it is she who is my Mother. It is she who is the Physician, and the Woman, and She Who Has Given Birth.”
When Adam was warned by the creator to disregard Eve's voice, he lost contact with the spirit, until she reappeared to him in the form of the serpent, who served as a the Female Instructing Principle, say the gnostic texts as interpreted by Pagels, who writes:
The [Gnostic] Secret Book concludes as Eve, the “perfect primal intelligence,” calls out to Adam—to the psyche (and so, in effect, to you and me, the readers)—to wake up, recognize her, and so receive spiritual illumination...And whereas the orthodox often blamed Eve for the fall and pointed to women’s submission as appropriate punishment, gnostics often depicted Eve—or the feminine spiritual power she represented—as the source of spiritual awakening.
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