The Song of the Pearl - II

Most people today who’ve even bothered to read the original of this Gnostic tale, to which a pointer is provided in the last posting, will tend to be baffled that any modern person could possibly take it seriously—much less as a valuable indicator of anything real. Here is a tale the grasp of which requires a certain kind of mind able, at least temporarily, to detach itself from the conventional scientific/rational mode of thought. Here we have the story of a person dispatched as a child into a foreign country by his parents to snatch a pearl guarded by a gigantic serpent. Why? So that, possessing it, the child will be enabled to become the heir of a kingdom? That’s what the text says. The entire premise, taken at its literal value, is nonsensical. Why would a child be sent to foreign parts? There are no giant serpents guarding magical pearls. What is back-story here? In what way is the child (already the offspring of a king) required to fetch a pearl to be the heir? What’s in that pearl? And, having said this much, we haven’t actually gone much farther than the first three paragraphs, roughly, of the story. Pure nonsense.

My first reaction, therefore, is to try to understand the context. I see this tale as a vivid illustration of a theory. The story would only make sense to an audience that already knew the concepts to be illustrated. It would then become a memorable way of holding in mind what the doctrine, in conceptual form, already contains. Fairy tales all work the same way. There is a hard content the tale illustrates. Elements of Cinderella and of Snow White carry echoes of the Song of the Pearl; and some have associated it with the biblical tale of the Prodigal Son. The Acts of Thomas, in which this tale is embedded, date from the third century of the current era. I doubt that people in that time believed in gigantic serpents either—or in magical pearls. What we are therefore dealing with here is a theory dressed as a tale. But it can be put in conceptual language too.

To extract that meaning, I note the following. The child originates in another world; it has a high status and is surrounded by luxury. It is sent away to a distant and dangerous place in order to obtain something of value that will qualify it later for its appointed role in life. Those who send it are aware of what they’re doing. They replace the child’s fancy garment with a simpler one. They send off the child assisted by two guides. But the guides eventually depart. The child adapts to its new environment. He meets a noble companion with whom he lives and shares his property. Eventually, in the process of participating in the new reality, he falls into forgetfulness and sleep. But his parents become aware of this development; they manage to send a message to awaken the now grown-up person. The message causes the man to remember something already imprinted on his mind—his status and mission. Thereafter he obtains the pearl relatively easily. Indeed, in some sense, the pearl is the remembering, the recapture of the child’s lost knowledge—in Greek its gnosis. This is, after all, a Gnostic tale, and knowledge is salvation. During the journey back, he leaves his earthly covering behind and dons the glorious, bejeweled garment he had left behind.

We could get sophisticated here and say that the two guides (why two?) are the hero’s earthly parents; the noble youth he meets and lives with may be a stand-in for a female, not a lad but, instead, a mate, and recognize, in the symbol of the serpent, his body itself, a vast network of circulation and of nerves. The pearl held by the serpent is itself the child now turned into a youth—who, by taming the serpent, by subordinating the body, obtains the great gift of transcendent knowledge.

What interests me in this story, as I’ve already noted in the last post, is that the tale describes what appears to be a necessary process. Life on this plane, based on this theory, has a definite value. It teaches something that, in that other order, the “East” of the tale, is difficult or impossible to get. The entire process is marked by intentionality: the child is sent, guided, has a companion for a while, and is then awakened by a message from on high. Once this message has reached him, his efforts to subdue the snake are accomplished with very little drama. There is no major battle here between the valiant prince and the dragon. For these reasons I view this kind of cosmology as developmental. It provides an explanation of the descent that, if all goes well, if the sleep is interrupted, if the message reaches its target, is followed by an ascent, the agent involved richer by the process.

I would conclude this by pointing out that so many of the stories we first heard as children—in which heroic women and men overcome obstacles and challenges, fight monsters or wicked witches to discover themselves, at the end, to be queens and kings—all of these tales carry the message contained in that letter that the hero of the Song of the Pearl receives from the East. But these are just children’s tales…. So? So back to reality. Let me get on the Internet and check out how my derivatives are doing….