Gnostics

Read this before anything else

They gave this wiki its vocabulary for the severed and we took one word out of three.

Everything we say about hylics is theirs. The framework it belonged to, we left behind.

Gnostics are a part of an Elder Cult. inherited

That is the whole of the inherited entry and it is probably accurate, though the wiki has never been able to say which one, how the relationship works, or whether a part of means a faction, a lineage, a tendency or a name that two bodies both use. See Elder Cults, where the same problem is general. contested

The creed

Set out at length under The Instructions and summarised here because this is where a reader will look for it.

The Instructions were never text. What He left was not a document to be recovered but the capacity to recognise, and a written creed is therefore already evidence of having failed to recognise. It is the only creed on that page that predicts its own unverifiability, and the only one that is not damaged by our inability to check it. inherited

Two things follow that make them unlike every other body documented here:

• They cannot be caught out. A creed that says the thing cannot be written cannot be embarrassed by the absence of a writing. Whether that is depth or armour is exactly what cannot be determined. contested

• They have no transmission problem. The Elder Cults entry records a lineage whose authority collapses if it is inspected. Gnostic authority does not depend on holding anything, so nothing can be demanded of them and nothing can be lost. unverified

The three kinds, of which we took one

The wiki's most-used borrowed word is hylic, and it is the bottom term of a three-part anthropology. Only that term came across. inherited

The scheme sorts people by what they are made of and what they are therefore capable of receiving: matter only at the bottom, and above it two further conditions the wiki has never named, discussed or filed. Our Hylics entry describes people with no spirit left in them, which is the bottom category doing exactly the work it does in the original — and then stops, because we never took the rest. contested

What the wiki inherits from taking one term of three:

• We have a word for the severed and no word for anything above it. Every distinction we can draw is between hollow and not-hollow, which is one bit of information about a scheme that carried more.
• It makes the wiki's cosmology flatter and bleaker than the one it borrowed from. In the original the categories ascend. In ours there is a floor and an undifferentiated everyone-else standing on it. unverified

• And it means Inoculation — the largest project on this wiki — is described entirely in terms of producing the bottom category, with no vocabulary at all for what is being destroyed. firsthand · Gershon

Whether we should adopt the other two terms is an open question here. The argument against is that borrowing a third of a framework was already presumptuous and borrowing the rest would not fix it. The argument for is that we are using their word and pretending it is ours. contested

Where they sit

• On Inoculation: no recorded position, which is itself odd for a body whose vocabulary the programme's outcome is named in.
• On The Instructions: as above — the only creed that survives being unverifiable.
• Among the four kinds: they know and do not give, though for a stated reason rather than as policy. If the thing cannot be transmitted in words then withholding is not a choice they are making. contested

• In the Iron Law of Cults: an inner circle defined by recognition rather than by information is the purest form the law predicts, since there is nothing to leak. unverified

How this entry was assembled

Drawn from: The inherited line. The creed as recorded under The Instructions, itself at two removes. A three-part scheme we know one third of.

Compiled by: Gershon.

Known weaknesses: We are describing a body we cannot locate, whose relationship to the Elder Cults we cannot state, using a framework we admit to having taken a fragment of. The section on the missing categories is the most useful thing here and is entirely about our own ignorance rather than about them.

Wanted: The other two terms, from anyone who holds the scheme intact. Any statement of the Gnostic position on Inoculation.