In the home group I'm part of we're currently reading and discussing Palmer J Palmer's Let Your Life Speak, a connected series of essays on the subject of vocation. Palmer's central idea is that discovering our vocation is not a matter of receiving a message from God, nor about becoming somebody or something, but about recovering our true selves. He says that we are born as unique, intact selves, but that as we grow the forces of our families, our schools, our churches and our societies lead us to lose sight of our true selves and take on identities which we perceive that others value. Discovering our true vocation is the process of digging through those adopted selves to rediscover and own the true self we are born to be.
The novel opens with a man appearing in a forest clearing. At least, physically he is a man, but mentally he is more like a new-born baby. He can still walk, but he is completely amnesiac. He can't talk or understand language, and can't even feed himself. He is also different from anyone the people in the Forest House have ever seen, with yellow eyes like a cat and a yellowish tinge to his skin. Nonetheless, they take him in and care for him, calling him 'Falk', their word for 'yellow'.
Five years later he is to all intents and purposes an adult once again - he can talk, read and reason, he has a romantic and sexual partnership with one of the residents of the Forest House, he is becoming a proficient hunter. Yet he has no memory of anything before his appearance in the clearing, and has no idea who he is. The denizens of the Forest House suspect that his mind has been erased by the Shing, the rulers of Earth. In an earlier era, Earth (or Terra) had been an advanced, spacefaring planet, part of a league of over 600 worlds. Over a thousand years before our story the Shing, invaders from a distant part of the galaxy, had broken the League and now ruled Earth. Their advantage came from their ability to 'mind-lie' - that is, to lie telepathically. Any human could lie verbally, but in telepathic communication they were only able to communicate truth. The Shing's ability to mind-lie enabled them to subvert trust, to divide and rule.
They use this same deceit to perpetuate their rule on Earth, dividing its peoples, suppressing any that become too powerful, setting them against one another. Yet they don't seem to benefit in any obvious way from their domination. Earth is sparsely populated, its people largely just subsisting. The Shing themselves don't seem to prosper either, far from their home world and no longer travelling in space, with a small population living in just a single city, Es Toch, the City of Illusions.
The central question of the novel is just like the central question in Let Your Life Speak - how can Falk recover his true identity? To do this he faces a paradox - the only way he can find it is to travel to the City Of Illusions and ask its lying rulers, who are probably the people who stole his identity in the first place. It is a hazardous journey. He is imprisoned in a house where he seeks a night's refuge, and captured by primitive herders on the plain who turn him into a slave. Yet he also has friends and advisors - his friends at the Forest House, a man who lives alone by the river who gives him hospitality and advises him to also travel alone, the Prince of Kansas who cryptically foretells his future and distrusts his companion.
But his closest advisor is a woman, Estrel, who helps him escape the herders and offers to guide him to Es Toch. Her guidance is a strange mixture of truth and lies - one the one hand, she does indeed lead him safely to the city. On the other, she does so because, unbeknownst to him, she is an agent of the Shing who has been sent out to find him and bring him to them. Once they arrive in the city she hands him over to them, and before he knows it he is a prisoner for a third time.
Yet it is only by walking into the arms of the Shing that he can discover his true self. They tell him almost immediately that his name is Ramarren and that he comes from a distant planet, and he even meets a young man who was a child on his interplanetary voyage. They also tell him a story about what happened to him and the rest of his crew, which his experience on earth leads him to disbelieve. But this is not really what he seeks - he wants to recover who he is. The Shing say that they can help him recover his lost memories and persona but there is a catch - in the process Falk, the persona he has developed in the previous five years, will be destroyed.
He sees the danger - without Falk's knowledge he will be an innocent in their hands, prey to their lies and manipulations. So he takes what steps he can and after the memory recovery procedure and a psychic struggle he emerges as Ramarren, a Lord of the planet Werel, but also retains Falk as a separate, subsidiary personality. Working together, the two are able to outwit the Shing, escape the planet and complete Ramarren's mission.
***
Throughout her life, Ursula LeGuin was a devotee of Taoism and Buddhism. Both faiths are present in City of Illusions. The quotes from the Old Canon, the sacred book Falk and other humans look to for guidance, come from the Tao Te Ching by Lao Tsu, the foundational text of Taoism. Yet to my limited knowledge of both faiths the story itself seems more like a Buddhist allegory, with Falk navigating his way through the world of illusion before finally attaining enlightenment.
I don't know a whole lot about either of these faiths and perhaps I am misreading them. As I reread City of Illusions this time around it made me think about the teachings of Gnostic Christianity. Gnosticism was a thriving, if minority, interpretation of the Christian Faith in the late Second and Third Centuries after Christ. After the Roman Emperors licensed and then adopted Christianity the church hierarchy used its new-found authority to suppress Gnostic teaching and to order the destruction of Gnostic writings.
Gnosticism is not a single, united, disciplined set of doctrines. There are a number of strands of Gnostic writings which have different ways of representing their ideas. Some are quite accessible to modern readers. For instance the Gospel of Thomas, the most widely read of the Gnostic documents, is a set of sayings of Jesus, largely without narrative context, many of which are versions of sayings contained in the canonical Gospels. Other Gnostic writings are far more esoteric, featuring strange cosmology and elaborate descriptions of a complex world of gods and spirits. Most are attributed to Biblical figures - many to apostles, others to various Old Testament figures among whom Seth the son of Adam is frequently cited. All of them are clearly pseudonymous and their actual authors are unknown.
Reading Gnostic texts as a 21st Century Christian is a baffling and often bizarre experience. We are largely taught to read the books of the Bible as historical texts (poetry notwithstanding) and although most Christians are aware that they may be factually inaccurate at times their narrative form at least is clear to us - in large part because our own narrative forms are heavily influenced by them. If you try to read the Gnostic texts in this way they can appear nonsensical. For me, the only way to appreciate them properly is to step outside our habitual literary-historical frameworks and read them on their own terms.
They are mythologies not histories, stories to explain the way the world is and how we should live in it. One of the most important of these mythologies is a retelling of the Jewish/Christian tale of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. Yahweh creates the world, places Adam and Eve in the garden and tells them not to eat from the Tree of Knowledge. However, unlike the orthodox telling of this tale, in the Gnostic version it is Yahweh who is the deceiver. Having created his world he wants to keep it for himself and to rule it absolutely, rather than acknowledging that he himself is but one of many great Spirits and that Adam and Eve themselves are such divine spirits and can ascend to the heavens. The Serpent, or in some retellings Eve, who doubles as Lilith, the female liberator spirit, is the hero, trying to open Adam's eyes to his true nature, and Yahweh can only keep control by evicting them from the Garden and sealing it off so that they have no further access to the Tree.
In this vision, Adam's task, and our task as Adam's children, is to recover the knowledge of ourselves as spiritual beings and to ascend through the heavens to the Highest Spirit. Many of the Gnostic texts contain elaborate descriptions of this ascent and of the many and varied spirits you encounter along the way. Most of this didn't mean much to me, but it is possible that when Gnosticism was a living spiritual practice these descriptions had counterparts in mystical rituals which guided devotees on this ascent and process of rediscovery.
***
Perhaps the reader can already see why I saw Falk/Ramarren's journey as a form of Gnostic myth. Falk is in fact a Star Person (that is to say, a heavenly being) but it is hard for him to know whether this is true - all he has are some vague half-memories and cryptic hints from earthly sages. To find out if it is really true, and what it means if it is, he must leave everything he knows and embark on a perilous journey. He needs guidance along the way but in a world full of liars it is hard to know who to trust.
In this context, the character of his guide Estrel is intriguing. Unbeknownst to him, she is an agent of the Shing and deceives him from the very beginning. Yet in doing so, she brings him to the place he was seeking all along, the only place where he can uncover the truth, just as the Gnostics must first come to the Church to learn about Christ, but then move beyond it to the truth hidden by the followers of Yahweh. In a sense, she is also a 'blind guide' - to use Jesus' phrase - because she also doesn't have a full understanding of her mission. Indeed, she seems to take more harm from the deception than he does. He sees her three times after she delivers him to the Shing. In the first she is triumphant, reporting success to her masters. In the second, he overhears her berating one of the Shing Lords for deceiving her about what would happen to Falk/Ramarren once she delivered him. In the third, she appears a broken woman, bursting into his room in a drunken state and berating him as if it was he who was the deceiver.
This is at least something like the journey we must all take. Many of the works we have studied in our home group hint at the same thing. Richard Rohr talks about how, having 'built our container' in the first half of our lives, we need to step outside it to become mature people. Brian McLaren talks about how we need to pass through stages of Simplicity and Complexity in our faith and progress through Perplexity to attain what he calls Harmony. In order to do this, we will often learn our early faith from people who are themselves in the stage of Complexity and who may work hard to keep us there when we no longer find it tenable; or, in Rohr's terms, try to keep us perpetually confined in our container. Often, like Estrel, they will become unreasonably angry with us if we step beyond what they have taught us, but without them we would never have got this far. McLaren in particular talks about the pain of being disowned by former friends and colleagues when he left the Evangelical fold.
But what does it mean for Falk to find his true self, after five years of learning the ways of Earth? The Shing offer him the opportunity to become Ramarren, at the expense of leaving Falk behind. He will become pure Star Person, with nothing of the earth person remaining. They tell him, and perhaps believe themselves, that this is the only possibility. Heaven and earth are incompatible, as indeed many have taught us in the Church including some of the Gnostics. Falk knows this is a dangerous path. Without Falk's earthly knowledge, Ramarren will be a heavenly innocent, prey to the Shing's deceptions, and will not survive long. In the popular parlance of my youth, he will be 'so heavenly minded he is no earthly use'. The Shing don't want to help Ramarren, they simply want to know the location of his world so that they can get there themselves before anyone can warn of their coming. After that Ramarren will be expendable and although he will not be killed (since murder is the one sin the Shing don't commit) he will perhaps have his mind re-erased and be returned to the wild once again.
It is only as the combined Falk/Ramarren, the Star-and-Earth Person, that he can succeed in his mission. Ramarren is dominant, wiser and more powerful, but Falk has knowledge that Ramarren needs, including the certainty that the Shing are liars and the intuition about what they want. And while in most ways Ramarren is a more powerful telepath than the Shing, when one of them finally, briefly, gains control of his mind in a moment of inattention it is Falk, lurking in the psychic shadows, who breaks the hold by the crude, earthly means of knocking the Shing unconscious.
Hence it is as both Falk and Ramarren, the Star-and-Earth Person, that he is able to return to his own planet and fulfil his mission, bringing Ramarren's knowledge of Earth's celestial location, Falk's knowledge of what life is like there, and their combined knowledge of its powerful, duplicitous rulers. The second coming of the Star person, or of his successors, will be a whole different matter.
***
I don't share this reflection as a way of trying to revive Gnosticism in the Christian church, but I do think the Gnostics (and Ursula LeGuin) can connect us with something we have lost in our modern, rationalistic faith. It is what Parker Palmer, Richard Rohr and Brian McLaren all remind us of in their own ways - that the spirituality we yearn for, and can attain through hard work and a certain amount of suffering, is beyond mere correct doctrine and right belief. Not that these beliefs are worthless, or even that they are wrong - they are beginning points on our journey, but they are means to an end, not ends in themselves.
In our age, this often means abandoning many things we are taught, as in the journey into Perplexity which Brian McLaren describes, but this is not a necessary step. McLaren himself talks about his mother, a woman who never left the stage of Simplicity within his system but led a fruitful life of devoted loving service. I think of my wife's beloved aunt, her second mother, who was similar. She never strayed from the straightforward fundamentalist faith she learned from her father, but she didn't sweat on it or try to bully or blackmail others into doing the same, although she prayed every day that her atheist children would recover their faith. Instead, she devoted her life to serving and helping others, providing a welcome to all sorts of people both through her accounting practice and her open house to the friends and partners of her large brood of children, nieces and nephews. She was a star person but also an earth person with a deep practical wisdom and a gift for figures. These two women, in Palmer's terms, knew who they were and lived according to it irrespective of some other wise teacher's spiritual system.
Back in the 4th century the church suppressed Gnosticism, seeing this as essential to its survival. The imposition of conformity was integral to its new role as an imperial religion, which brought with it both safety and temporal power. But in the 4th century the Gnostic world view was not so far from the church's as it is from ours. In that age Satan, who we have demoted to be ruler of hell if we think about him at all, was the ruler of this world, a usurper god who held us all in his thrall. Jesus was the Star Person, if you will, who came to redeem us and reclaim us as his own, as well as to reclaim the world itself for his Father. Substituting Yahweh into the Satan role was not so much of a stretch and provided a way for the Gnostics to make a clean break with Christianity's Jewish roots after Christians had been permanently exiled from the Jewish synagogues.
We have no need to make such a break, nor to enforce such conformity. In the 21st century West the battle is not between true believers and heretics but between people of faith and those who have none and are surrendering to a world-wrecking nihilism. Nor is it a battle between faith and science as some fundamentalists would have us believe, as if an accurate knowledge of the Earth could somehow bar us from Heaven.
No, for us to discover our vocation we need these three things. We need to know who we really are. We need Falk's knowledge of the Earth so that we will not act in ignorance. We need to be able tell the difference between truth and lies, and follow the truth. And we need Ramarren's knowledge of the stars and of our true destination, or at least of the direction in which we should travel, so that we can put that knowldge to good use and not succumb to narcissism or aimlessness. If we have these three things, we probably won't save the world, as the story seems to promise that Ramarren will, but at least we will make our own distinctive contribution to making it a better place.
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