What Christians are Reading II
In a previous post, I reviewed a random book from a local Little Free Library - a bestselling Christian book - and a quick scan through the book made it clear that this was a Trojan Horse to wheel Gnosticism into the sanctuary.
Just a couple days later, I have acquired two more random books from one of our local Little Free Libraries: both of which are dedicated to health and wellness.
The first, Goddesses Never Age, was written by a board-certified ob/gyn who practiced medicine for 25 years. The book has 1,297 customer reviews on Amazon, 77% five-star and 12% four-star - with an average of 4.6.
The author has an impressive list of credentials that include professorships at the University of Vermont College of Medicine and Tufts University of Medicine. She was also Director of Resident’s Outpatient Obstetrics & Gynecology Clinic at St. Margaret’s Hospital in Boston. Dr. Northrup is no fringe practitioner or someone who earned the degree only to push crackpot theories outside of the realm of certified medical practice. She is in the mainstream of medicine and has both the credentials and the experience to back it up.
The title of the book is not likely a turnoff for Christian women, as the word “goddess” is often used colloquially, as in the expression “domestic goddess.” The subtitle of the book places it within the genre of health and beauty, specifically in terms of ageing: “The Secret Prescription for Radiance, Vitality, and Well-Being.”
However, this book is not about medicine or science. It is a theology book masquerading as one of the many usual self-help books about healthy living.
The dedication of the book is “To the ageless goddess that lives in every woman - and to Gaia Sophia, the Earth herself.”
Sophia is one of the aeons (emanations of the Monad or the Source) in Gnostic theology. In the Gnostic myth, Sophia is the illegitimate mother of Yahweh, also known as the Demiurge, a corrupted half-god who creates the material universe and enslaves his creatures who are stuck in the world of matter and physicality. In mercy for us, Sophia gives every human a “divine spark” and the true God sends enlightened souls to earth to try to lead us away from Yahweh’s lies, so that we can transcend materialism, return to the Source, and become one with the universe. Gnosticism has a tradition of the Divine Feminine as well as a desire to break down all barriers, including that of masculine and feminine.
The introduction begins with a sociological and physiological discussion about ageing, and makes the argument for staying healthy and vigorous into old age. Northrup writes: “Growing older is an opportunity for you to increase your value and competence as the neural connections in your hippocampus and throughout your brain increase, weaving into your brain and body the wisdom of a life well lived.” The author specifically refers to her work as a “health book.” A discussion about menopause follows. Toward the end, she puts the question to the reader: “So are you going to grow older with gusto or deteriorate with age?” She brings up the need for a good diet and mastery over “processed foods sugar, caffeine,” and encourages her readers to “start living courageously, as if you really mean it.”
So far, so good.
But notice this paragraph wedged into the introduction that reveals what the book is really about:
The soul is ageless, and it’s an expression of the divine, feminine creative force of the universe. The sacred feminine has traditionally been associated with darkness, the body, mystery, fertility receiving, and the primordial soup - the womb in which all life begins and is nurtured. Every woman is an ageless goddess, an expression of the feminine physical form. Unfortunately, we often forget this in the onslaught of ageist cultural messages about growing older and make a conscious effort to reject them.
She promises that “in Chapter 11, you will receive guidance on listening to your goddess-like wisdom” and “how to forge a new relationship with the earth and her inhabitants as you step fully into your ageless goddess self.”
The book is obsessed with sexuality, and speaks of the orgasm as a kind of thing to be worshiped. Throughout the book there are snippets of pseudo-history of the suppression of the Feminine Divine by oppressors and “dominators.” There is a section called “Reclaiming Aphrodite” that calls to mind many of the goddesses in the pagan pantheon. Northrup writes: “The archetype of the sacred sexual goddess lived in our collective psyches for eons until the rise of agriculture, when the collaborative societies that worshiped the goddess were replaced by societies that worshiped the male god” who went on to “deny, suppress, control, and demonize the power of women’s sexuality.” “These dominator societies were focused more on individual triumph than collaboration.” She writes, “While this may seem like ancient history, we can see the same ideas playing out today, even in the U.S., where some states actually have laws to force vaginal ultrasounds on women who choose abortion.” “But deep down, we know we’re meant to be sexual, sensual, life-giving, ageless goddesses. And deep down we know that sex and Spirit go hand in hand.” She assures us that this is not “something you are apt to learn about while sitting in a church pew. Sexuality is power. It’s our connection to the creative life force.”
“To embody Aphrodite is to be a diva in the original sense of the word,” she says, “unapologetic about your longings and cravings and unchecked in your pleasurable pursuits.”
All of this is really just a reiteration of the old heresy of Gnosticism. Northrup continues:
As Judy Harrow wrote in Gnosis magazine, ‘Aphrodite’s rituals of love and pleasure are the acts which connect the inner and outer planes… we must actually dance, sing, feast, make music, and love in Her honor. It is with our bodies that we worship Her, and through our bodies that She blesses us. By these earthly rituals the false divisions between body and spirit, between mind and nature, are healed. We find Sacred within us all things, within our beautiful, living Mother Earth.”
“Spirituality and sexuality,” Northrup writes, “are two aspects of exactly the same thing, despite the fact that they have been separated by many cultures and many religions for millennia.”
She goes on to tell of an incident in which her friends pressured her to jump up on a bar in New York City and dance erotically. Her “sister goddesses” cheered her on. “But I noticed that my daughters were not exactly thrilled with my performance, even though I wanted their approval. My youngest said, ‘Really, Mom, I don’t like seeing you like that.’” Northrup consulted with one of her Ph.D. friends, a “cultural anthropologist” who “suggested that I shouldn’t let my daughters’ reaction stop me. It was too important to claim my right to sexual pleasure.”
The book is really not about health at all. It is a Trojan Horse of Gnostic religion sold as just another book on health and ageing.
The Acknowledgements are also interesting. Dr. Northrup cites her collaborators that include practitioners of Intuitive Movement, crystals, Traditional Chinese Medicine, Divine Order, Divine Love, magic, Divine Presence, and astrology.
At the end is the author’s hawking of her health and beauty products.
In spite of the medical establishment’s veneer of science and the rejection of pseudoscience, faith healing, quackery, and religion, this book and its author are not ostracized. Dr. Northrup has not lost her board certification or license to practice medicine. The mainstreaming of the Gnostic faith has led to an entire discipline among mainstream divinity schools and seminaries exploring the “divine feminine” and a feminist hermeneutic for reading the Scriptures - one that openly uses Gnostic writings to interpret Scripture and to come to different doctrinal conclusions, particularly about sex and gender. The mainstreaming of women’s “ordination” and Pope Francis’s recent endorsement of homosexual civil unions are the fruit of this neo-Gnosticism.
The second book that I ran across is called Many Lives Many Masters by a practicing psychiatrist named Brian Weiss, MD. Dr. Weiss also has impressive bona fides: a practicing psychiatrist, graduate of Columbia University (Phi Beta Kappa, cum laude) and Yale Medical School, Chairman Emeritus of Mount Sinai Medical Center. He was a professor of Psychiatry at the University of Miami Medical School. He is by no means considered a crackpot in his field.
Many Lives, Many Masters is considered a classic psychiatric text, written in 1988. Of the 5,866 customer reviews on Amazon, 84% are five-star, and 9% are four-star, with an average rating of 4.7 stars. The book is all about “past-life regression” and is based on belief in reincarnation. Dr. Weiss went down this path in response to one of his patients who, in a hypnotic trance, “recalled past-life memories, that proved to be the causative factors of her symptoms. She also was able to act as a conduit for information from highly evolved ‘spirit entities,’ and through them she revealed many of the secrets of life and of death.” Her channeling included “remarkable revelations about Dr. Weiss’s family and his dead son.”
Weiss refers to Carl Jung - a student of Gnosticism who incorporated the Gnostic religion and mythology into the field of psychiatry - in terms of the “collective unconscious, the energy source that surrounds us and contains the memories of the entire human race.”
Again, this Trojan Horse of Gnostic religion is considered entirely acceptable and ethical for a psychiatrist to not only write about, but use in his practice and treatment of patients. As of 1988, the author claims to have treated more than 4,000 patients in this way, and spoken to thousands in his workshops. In psychiatry, this Gnostic therapy is not outside the mainstream. It is not considered pseudoscience or scoffed at the way Christianity is.
He speaks of “patients during regressions speaking foreign languages that they have never learned. This is called xenoglossy.” Within Christianity, this is often a sign of demonic activity. He recalls a “dramatic case:
of pain relief, a woman in her sixties was able to eliminate her severe back pain completely. She had suffered for seventeen years from intractable pain from cancer and the subsequent treatments for her illness and required daily pain medication. But after remembering a lifetime in ancient Jerusalem, when she had been a man whose back had been broken by Roman soldiers, her back pain disappeared and has never returned. She was able to stop her medicine immediately. Her life has been transformed.
Again, the modern field of psychiatry has more faith in the supernatural than do many Christians. Roman Catholic dissident from Pope Francis, Cardinal Carlo Maria Vigano recently observed, among Christians, “the abandonment on the part of, even of the ecclesiastical hierarchy, even at the top, of the supernatural dimension of the Church and its eschatological role.” Even as Christians are becoming more worldly, easily dismissing the dangers of witchcraft, the occult, and the supernatural, mainstream medicine is embracing the theological - in its Gnostic form.
Weiss cites the Roman Catholic Jesuit priest and mystic Teilhard de Chardin: “We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience.” Weiss adds: “Our bodies are temporary. We are souls.” He elaborates the belief of “soul-mates” as:
souls with whom we have been reincarnated many times. Soul-mate relationships may be romantic, but frequently are not, such as parent and child, siblings or best friends, grandparent and grandchild, and so on. Our bodies and relationships change, but the souls are the same. Your grandmother, for instance, may reincarnate as your son. Same soul, different body.
Like the Goddesses book, Many Lives contains obvious references to Gnostic theology masquerading as science. These are not obscure fringe books written by crackpots, but are rather both written by practicing M.D.s with convincing credentials and active practices. Their books and lectures and workshops are mainstream and popular, accepted by the medical and psychiatric establishment, unlike, say therapy to convince a person suffering from gender dysphoria or same sex attraction to analyze one’s gender in terms of one’s biology. This “conversion therapy” is considered “pseudoscience” - unlike goddess and reincarnation therapies - by the governing boards of medicine, and is actually illegal in many jurisdictions.
In my own pastoral practice and friendships in our mostly-Roman Catholic Community, the draw to this kind of occult practice is often irresistible. People yearn for contact with their dead relatives, and seek transcendence of the physical world. They read books and watch TV shows featuring witches, vampires, seances, spells, ghosts, mediums, and tap into the sinful flesh’s desire to have contact with the supernatural. And in the case of these two books, written by “scientific” medical doctors, the practice of women’s medicine and psychiatry endorse these forays into the occult.
We Christians need to be aware of the ubiquity of the New Age religions - which really aren’t new at all. They are a reincarnation of Gnosticism and simply reprise the Serpent in the Garden: “Did God actually say…?”
