El Arbol de la Gnosis

This work deals, for the first time, with a complete presentation of all the dualistic religions whose history has so profoundly influenced the West: Gnosticism, Marcionism, Manichaeism, Paulicianism, Bogomilism, and Occitan and Lombard Catharism. Ioan Culianu's book not only fills a gap in the history of ideas. He makes a fundamental discovery: the dualist currents are a system, and must be studied from a synchronic perspective, which means that the search for their historical relationships is futile. In reality, they do not "derive" from one another, but represent the result of the same mental operations, based on the same premises and the same text: the first three chapters of biblical Genesis. In the same way, Culianu shows us that the premises of dualism generate a system that tends to perpetuate itself ad infinitum, and that therefore exists, here and now, in our philosophical, political and scientific ideas, and even closer to us: in the apparent flow of our own thoughts.