M. DAVID LITWA

Written By G. McCaughry

M. David Litwa, PhD., 2024.

Illustration by JosΓ© Gabriel AlegrΓ­a Sabogal for the forthcoming title, Hermetica I: The Corpus Hermeticum, Asclepius, and Nag Hammadi Hermetica Ordered as a Path of Initiation.

Dr. Litwa's career began with a monograph on deification (becoming god) as seen through the lens of the Pauline writings (We Are Being Transformed, 2012). In 2013, he offered a general introduction to deification in Western culture from the Pharaohs to modern Transhumanists. Then in 2016, he focused on the politics and literature of self-deification (Desiring Divinity). He has twice engaged gospel literature as a witness to Jesus’s literary deification (Iesus Deus, 2014) and to a particular historiographical genre (How the Gospels Became History, 2019).

A fascination with alternative Christian movements inspired him to edit and translate the anonymous Refutation of All Heresies (2016). After that came the annotated translation of important Hermetic testimonia and fragments (Hermetica II, 2018). Litwa also finished a project on angelification traditions in Hellenic and Christian literature (Posthuman Transformation, 2022).

He has published history of alternative Christian movements in the second-century CE (Found Christianities). A full book on one of these movements, the Carpocratians, came out in 2022. It contains the first ever fully commentary on β€œSecret Mark.” Dr. Litwa's most popular book, The Evil Creator (2021), tells the secret history of how Christians like Marcion came to view the creator as evil. Late Revelations is a short, accessible argument for a late date of the final form of the Gospels and Acts.

Hermetica I: The Corpus Hermeticum, Asclepius, and Nag Hammadi Hermetica Ordered as a Path of Initiation [The Definitive Edition] is Dr. Litwa’s first publication with Fount Ultd. (2026)

G. McCaughry

Gabriel McCaughry is a scholar-practitioner of the Mystery Traditions, with sustained research interests in Spiritual Alchemy, Hermeticism, Gnosticism, theological exegesis, non-dual metaphysics, esoteric Buddhist systems, and traditional craft lineages. His work is informed by a devotional praxis oriented toward what he terms the Omni-Cipherβ€”the ineffable ground and manifold radiance of the Pleroma. He is the founder and CEO of Anathema Publishing Ltd. and FOUNT Ultd., publishing houses dedicated to rigorous esoteric, philosophical, and initiatory works.

His first book, (h)Auroræ (Anathema Publishing Ltd., 2018), presents an initiatory framework for Alchemical self-transmutation, approached less through doctrinal exposition than through poetic inference and symbolic density. The text seeks to gesture toward modes of knowing that exceed discursive language, inviting the reader into a contemplative engagement with paradox, polysemy, and the interior logic of the Great Work. Rather than prescribing conclusions, (h)Auroræ functions as a catalystβ€”an intellectual and spiritual crucible through which the attentive reader may apprehend their own process of transformation.

https://www.anathemapublishing.com
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IAN C. EDWARDS