Behind the conventional history of Christianity there is an alternative tradition to which the Gnostic Gospels provide a key. This story is by no means simple and the flow is frequently muddled along the centuries. It begins almost at the end with the discovery in 1945 in the sands of Upper Egypt of a series of ancient books - a golden string of secret teachings emanating from second-century Alexandria, passing through medieval France as dangerous heresies, through the Renaissance as a promise of scientific enlightment, thence underground to the present day. This book studies the relevance of Gnostic ideas to issues and situation in own century.
