Dick on Gnosticism

GNOSTICISM WATCH: The 10 best adventure novels from 1965. Joshua Glenn shows why 1965 was a very good year for science fiction, comic books, and spy novels (BoingBoing).

Philip K. Dick’s science fiction adventure The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch. Via an odyssey of nested hallucinations, Dick burns the Gnostic idea that the world is the creation not of God, but of an evil, lesser deity, forever into the reader’s mind. The title character is a demiurge who brings to mankind a “negative trinity” of “alienation, blurred reality, and despair.” Probably my favorite PKD novel, after A Scanner Darkly.

More on Philip K. Dick here. And lots more on modern reflections of Gnosticism here and here and links.