u/Sacredless

If you’ve been around witchcraft and paganism, you may have been exposed to the phrase ‘unverified personal gnosis’. Personal gnosis is often seen as kind of woo-ey, since it is often seen as something people just sort of make up for themselves. However, I think I’ve settled upon a more useful structure for how we can see the development of personal gnosis and what the precursors are.

I hope you'll enjoy the reading!

If you've been around witchcraft and paganism, you may have been exposed to the phrase 'unverified personal gnosis'. Personal gnosis is often seen as kind of woo-ey, since it is often seen as something people just sort of make up for themselves. However, I think I've settled upon a more useful structure for how we can see the development of personal gnosis and what the precursors are.

I'll mostly be discussing personal gnosis in terms of deity associations, but personal gnosis can also refer to personal takes on herb or mineral symbolism. Just keep this in mind.

Can we reconstruct the gnosis of the ancients?

I'll share a couple of instructive quotes:

>"For most of our 300,000-year history, we humans have had an intimate relationship with the rest of the living world. We know that people in early human societies were likely to be able to describe the names, properties and personalities of hundreds if not thousands of plants, insects, animals, rivers, mountains and soils, in much the same way people today know the most recondite facts about actors, celebrities, politicians and product brands. Aware that their existence depended on the well-being of other living systems around them, they paid close attention to how those systems worked."

—Jason Hickel, Less Is More

>"Even if you could climb into Aristotle’s head, as Kuhn was fond of recommending, how would you know how to navigate inside it? And if you somehow really succeed in thinking and talking just like Aristotle and his contemporaries, how would you come back and tell the rest of us what you have learned? If you could truly attain this ideal of historiography, you would be Aristotle, and we would need other historians to decipher for the rest of us what you are saying. The completely faithful history, if one could achieve it, might just be the past itself, like Borges’s perfect map that is just the terrain itself, and therefore completely useless."

—Hasok Chang, Presentist History for Pluralist Science, Journal for General Philosophy of Science (2021) 52:97–114

From this we can synthesize something that is probably pretty obvious, but needs to be understood. Historical attitudes can only be approximated. People had very different cognitive relationships with the natural world than we do today.

All of this makes it very challenging to crawl into the heads of the ancients and figure out when they sincerely thought they were simply using figures of speech, when they were using deity literalism, when they did so in a continuum and what the consequences on theologies were.

Prior to UPG: The Metonymy to Gnosis Pipeline

There's a way where we talk about certain concepts under a name that we think of as representing something bigger. We do this with 'Silicon Valley', for example, where the phrase stands in for a larger, difficult to delineate phenomenon in society. We also do this with 'The Earth' or 'Lady Justice' or 'Lady Liberty', the latter two being more explicitly goddesses. This is called 'metonymy', where a figure of speech to describe a phenomenon is spoken of as if a character unto themselves. It is even likely that the concept of deity was so continuous with the natural world that figures of speech are always assumed to be describing some form of numinal entity. My witchcraft teacher likes to say that witchcraft is weaponized aesthetics and metonymy is a part of that arsenal. Cultpunk calls this engagement with as if imagery 'deep play'.

https://cultpunk.art/2026/01/25/mythopoetic-ritual-as-deep-play/

This feeds into UPG. UPG is when discussing something as if becomes a more sincere commitment.

For example, when is a syncretism a ritual convention and when is a syncretism gnosis? If there's a couple of entities that we could appeal to for a particular thing in a ritual context, we can metonymize them into a syncretic entity. Within a modern context, that might be 'firearms safety'. For the purpose of this firearms safety ritual, we might call upon a metonymy of 'Zeus-Ares-Hephaestos', and we ascribe certain features to this metonymy:

>Plausible justification: Zeus reshaped the world through violent, generative action, very much like the invention of fire-arms did. Hephaestos makes complicated objects with metal and fire. Ares is associated with temperamental objects of war.

Note that simply by calling upon 'Zeus-Ares-Hephaestos' in this metonymic way, we are not necessarily committing ourselves to a UPG of Zeus-Ares-Hephaestos syncretism. Rather, we're calling upon a metonymy that stands in place of whatever numinal entity has firearms safety in their domain that obviously isn't found in literature, or even stands in the place of fire safety itself in more mythopoetic language.

It becomes a UPG when the metonymy or other association become stable enough that you gain an intuition of its temperaments and, for lack of a better word, personality. A lightning-strike moment can happen where something suddenly makes sense with a particular piece of historical insight. I do think that a modicum of historical insight is indispensable, but only indispensable and not a hard requirement. If there is history that you can call upon, you should use it, but if history yields no obvious answers (as it often does not) then we obviously have to make do.

Personal examples

This is where my UPG about Melete, Mneme and Aoide comes from. I had been using the metonymy of Diligence, Reflection and Openness as dimensions of love in various iterations for a long time and when I came across Melete, Mneme and Aoide, I had a lightning bolt moment where I stood up from my couch and said 'that's them!'.

It isn't yet verified, though. Melete, Mneme and Aoide are actually Practice, Memory and Melody, but they are close enough that within a particular neo-platonic framework, I feel a strong personal connection to these three as representing Diligence, Reflection and Openness as dimensions of love. What started as a more metonymic figure of speech kind of contemplation became a sincere commitment.

In another example, there's a common phrase in protest which goes 'No Justice, No Peace'. Those are two of the three Horae (the last one being 'Normalcy', which is also often discussed) and I had another lightning strike moment that these three well known metonymies are highly active in the world right now and so may as well be deity. The domain is not a UPG, but their activity and influence in the world could be seen as UPG or possibly even SPG (Shared Personal Gnosis) based on how active the metonymies have been.

Capital J 'Justice' and capital P 'Peace' are very top of mind metonyms that we don't usually think of as metonyms. Is the connection drawn in the sign here a form of shared gnosis about the relatedness of justice and peace?

I personally also look towards pop culture. Are there particular metonymies or dramatic characters in active use that correspond to particular deities? If one person adopts these metonymies or dramatic characters as representative of their specific deities, then that would be a UPG and if multiple people adopt these metonymies or dramatic characters as representative of their specific deities with historical backing, then there might be an argument for it being SPG.

These are obviously only my opinions, but I hope that they are useful.

I love House of Haemonia and I think it'd be fun to have a discussion here. I'll post my thoughts on the video in a comment.