Into Darkness: A Meditation on the Winter Solstice and the Birth of Christ

The various late-classical sects falling under the catchall term “Gnostics” were nothing if not some of the most impressive practitioners of mythopoesis the world has ever seen. Drawing on biblical, platonic, and Zoroastrian antecedents, their various mythologies—which have influenced scores of poets, thinkers, writers, and artists from Jacob Boehme to William Blake, from Cormac McCarthy to Terrence Malick—are extraordinarily rich and imaginative explorations of the human condition, a...