The soul-mood of knowing: the inner tone in which a person grasps the world through cognitional forces in the soul itself rather than through the senses.
Gnosis in Anthroposophy is the first of Rudolf Steiner's seven soul-moods, the knowing-tone in which any of the twelve world-outlooks can be held. Set out in Human and Cosmic Thought (GA 151, Berlin, January 1914), it names the disposition of a soul that grasps reality not through the senses but through cognitional forces working in the soul itself. Steiner ranks it as Saturn among the seven planetary moods, the temper most at home in the spiritualist standpoint yet free to circle through all twelve like a planet through the zodiac. A Gnostic of Idealism sees the ideals of mankind in sharp inner contour; a Gnostic of Realism reads outer things with rare precision. The mood carries forward ancient Gnosis as direct cognition of the spiritual, and today it underwrites any disciplined practice of trained inner perception.
In Steiner's Own Words
A man is a Gnostic when his disposition is such that he gets to know the things of the world not through the senses, but through certain cognitional forces in the soul itself. A man can be a Gnostic and at the same time have a certain inclination to be illuminated by e.g. the mental-zodiacal-sign that we have here called “Spiritism”. Then his Gnosticism will have a deeply illuminated insight into the relationships of the spiritual worlds. But a man can also be, e.g. a Gnostic of Idealism; then he will have a special proclivity for seeing clearly the ideals of mankind and the ideas of the world.
What it Means Today
Steiner borrowed the word Gnosis from a living current. The ancient Gnostics of the first and second centuries, the school of Valentinus in Alexandria and Rome chief among them, held that the soul could reach the divine not by belief or argument but by a saving act of knowing, a direct cognition they called gnosis. For centuries that current was known mostly through the hostile summaries of its opponents, until thirteen Coptic codices were unearthed near Nag Hammadi in Upper Egypt in December 1945 and gave scholars the Gnostics' own voice at last. The historian of religion Gilles Quispel, who recovered the Jung Codex from that find and worked on it at the Bollingen-funded institute in Zurich, spent his career showing that Gnosis was not a doctrine to be catalogued but an experience of knowing to be entered.
That distinction is exactly what Steiner names in 1914. For him Gnosis is not a set of beliefs at all but a mood, a tone the knowing soul can carry into any standpoint it adopts. A person in this mood reaches the world through cognitional forces lying in the soul, the way the older Gnostics claimed direct access to the spiritual. Read this way, the modern reader stops asking whether the Gnostics were right or wrong and starts asking a sharper question: in what temper does my own knowing actually proceed? Steiner's seven-mood scheme makes Gnosis one trainable disposition among several, distinct from the will-driven tone of Voluntarism or the calm devotion of Mysticism. To recognise the Gnostic tone in oneself is the first step toward holding it deliberately rather than by accident of temperament.
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