ABSTRACT
Gnostics' treatments of what are normally recognizable as historical materials are typically extensions of cosmogonic unfoldings and cosmological outworkings rather than matters of detailed interest and narratological expression for their own sake. Macrohistory, as a heuristic concept, captures the adventurous visioning of the human past as a whole, in god-like panoramic regard or "the mind's eye," often including a sense of where humanity is heading. The recognizable classic Gnostic response to temporality is to mythologize it, so that it falls subservient to "a cosmic framing," or stands as mere appendage to a cosmo-history of emanations, or as the terrestrial setting in which the story of cosmic power relations is taught. Signs of "more rootedness in historical reality," and also hopes of a future apocalyptic denouement on earth, only come through greater seepage from more standard, less mythicized human happenings in the "Judeo-Christian" tradition.
