In case you missed it, here’s a piece about my recent trip to Los Angeles to do fieldwork with various Gnostic groups, which was published on the Open University’s Contemporary Religion in Historical Perspective blog a couple of months ago.
If I were a certain kind of scholar, I might speculate that there is so much gnosticism in LA because Hollywood is the symbolic centre of the archonic media matrix where the illusory world of the demiurge is created. More prosaically, LA has long been a centre for religious innovation due to being multicultural, liberal and relatively cheap. People were going West in search of new ways of life long before the Hippies emerged from Haight-Ashbury to catalyse the spiritual revolution of the New Age movement. Moreover, contemporary gnostics mix esoteric ideas with Christianity, and so appeal much more to American Baby Boomers than to their relatively secularised European counterparts.
Being back at davidgrobertson for the first time in months, I see an update / refresh is in order…
David G. Robertson 