^* Some Gnostic sects were deeply invested in these incentives to imaginal reverie. A Christian bishop complained of the Valentinians, “Every day one of them invents something new, and none of them is considered perfect unless he is productive this way” (Jonas, 179). As Hans Jonas indicates, such poetic fertility was germane to gnostic cosmology, which supposed the world to be the result of divine malfeasance; so the creative potential of individual gnosis was conceived on the grandest terms as “the inverse equivalent of the pre-cosmic universal event of divine ignorance, and in its redeeming effect of the same ontological order. The actualization of knowledge in the person is at the same time an act in the general ground of being” (176).

^† See O’Leary’s “Deep Trouble/Deep Treble” for an informative discussion of Mackey’s gnosticism. It’s also useful to note Mackey’s heretical (gnostic) swerve from the traditional African American tendency to construe historical calamity in biblical terms.