My name is Daniel McCoy, and I’m the creator of this site and the writer of everything here. These days, I’m largely known for another website of mine, Norse Mythology for Smart People, and the book The Viking Spirit: An Introduction to Norse Mythology and Religion.
I’m not an academic (I have a mere BA degree that I’ve never used for anything), but rather an independent writer. As such, my work on this site is a matter of presenting the soundest and most up-to-date scholarly work on Gnosticism in an accessible and engaging yet still rigorous way for a general audience. Every factual claim I make cites the work of esteemed academics, on whose authority the authority of my own work rests.
Gnosticism is a subject that has fascinated me since I was a teenager. That interest is primarily due to the worldview embedded within Gnosticism’s theology and myth, a worldview in which the irreconcilable conflict between our deepest yearnings and the nature of this world is a product of our fundamental unsuitability for this world – that there’s something within us that belongs elsewhere, and can never truly be at home in this world. Some inkling of that seems to be a more or less universal feature of the human condition, but it’s one that I feel particularly often and particularly acutely. The Gnostics seem to have shared that disposition, and to have dealt with it in a particularly sensible and useful manner.
Since I’m not a Gnostic, nor a Christian of any sort, nor anti-Christian, I have no particular ax to grind here. I love exploring this material in an open-ended way. My hope is that some others might be able to find some value in it just as I have, whatever that value may be.
I’m originally from Nashville, Tennessee, and these days I live in Bangor, Maine.