Lady Gaga's Gnostic Revival: Gnosticism, Neoplatonism and the Perversion of Pop Culture
By David Gosselin
I'm just a Holy Fool, oh, baby, it's so cruel
But I'm still in love with Judas, baby…
I wanna love you
But something's pulling me away from you
Jesus is my virtue—
And Judas is the demon I cling to
— “Judas” by Lady Gaga
One of the best ways to examine how ancient Gnosticism has embedded itself in the modern world is to look at “pop culture.”
Debuting her new music video at the 2025 Grammys, Lady Gaga’s latest “Abracadabra” offering features Dionysian tribal dancing frenzies, a death spell, and incantations under “the dark moonlight,” among other things. It’s only the latest example which highlights the quintessential “experiential” dimension of all Gnostic belief.
Always playful and prepared for a general audience, the underlying magic of the these modern incantations comes by way of catchy lyrics, hypnotic rhythms and suggestive visuals. The accompanying music video usually tells its own separate story, offering additional ambiguous layers of meaning which are absorbed into the psyche with the aid of catchy “hooks.”
So what is Gnosticism, really?
Modern Trance-formational Magic
Like a poem said by a lady in red
You hear the last few words of your life
With a haunting dance, now you're both in a trance
It's time to cast your spell on the night
—“Abracadabra” by Lady Gaga
Centered on the notion of “experiential” knowledge (or “gnosis”) and “altered-states” as a sacred rite, experiences of the divine in Gnosticism are presented as trance-formative experiences. Going back to ancient times, these sacred experiences were traditionally overseen by the Greek God Dionysus, or Bacchus.
Whether wine, poetry, music, dance or any other kind of magical rite, the god Dionysus was ultimately the god of “altered-states.” Theatre performances, orgiastic revelries, and sacred festivals all fell under the same trance-formational God who allowed human beings to access new states of feeling and consciousness denied by ordinary, waking consciousness.
This, we are told, is what Western civilization largely gave up when it gave into Christianity and embraced the modern world in the aftermath of the 15th century Golden Renaissance.
So Carl Jung describes man’s newfound consciousness of his powers of reason stemming from the Renaissance as something of the original “Promethean sin”. In his lecture “The Modern Spiritual Problem,” he writes: “To be ‘unhistorical’ is the Promethean sin, and in this sense modern man lives in sin. A higher level of consciousness is like a burden of guilt.”
With the development of a conscious notion of his powers of creative reason, man was supposedly torn from all the previous traditions which he had engaged in during earlier traditional and archaic times where “magic” and the supernatural were integral parts of daily life.
For Jung, a gnostic revival lay at the heart of reconnecting with those “intuitive” forces which lay at the heart of the magic of human existence. The disenchantment and “haunting” of modern man was due to his essentially abandoning magic.
The purpose of psychoanalysis for Jung was only superficially a matter of curing neuroses. The deeper purpose lay in connecting man with those subterranean, unconscious and non-rational, primordial impulses whose denial was the cause of civilization’s modern malaise.
As Jung writes:
“Psychic life always found expression in a metaphysical system of some sort. But the conscious, modern man, despite his strenuous and dogged efforts to do so, can no longer refrain from acknowledging the might of psychic forces. This distinguishes our time from all others. We can no longer deny that the dark stirrings of the unconscious are effective powers—that psychic forces exist which cannot, for the present at least, be fitted in with our rational world-order.”
