AGNOSIS

• Gnosticism: even though the Nag Hammadi texts were discovered in 1945, a number of gnostic texts were known and attributed to Hermes Trismegistus (Hermes the Thrice Great), hence the Hermetic Tradition.

Joyce dabbled to a certain extent in these texts. There is a doctoral thesis here in this one sentence. What texts did Joyce know? What was their view on the Divine Pleroma, the Archons and Powers before Sophia fell and created CREATION. Astrology is a large part of Hermeticism. Determination in this light would be a fore-ordained fate, read in the position of the celestial spheres. Knowledge (gnosis) of precreate (before the fall of Sophia) determinism, before the creation of the material realm with its planets would be quite different from post creation agnosis.

• Agnosis: the state of "not knowing" as in agnostic.

• Agonistes:" a person engaged in the agony, the struggle of living in a post-creation state of "not knowing." In Hermetic thinking, the state of post-creation is under the control of planetary influences. Ficino and Pico della Mirandola and later Bruno, sought methods to work with these controllers of man's destiny. Ficino used only astrological magic. Mirandola went beyond that to the Kabala. See Frances Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition for more information.

• Samson Agonistes: Milton's tragedy of Samson's struggle and redemption. Here lies another doctoral dissertation.