Definition of "Gnosticism"

Gnosticism

/ˈnɒstɪsɪzəm/

noun
countable and uncountable, plural Gnosticisms
1. A wide variety of Jewish and early Christian sects having an interest in gnosis, or divine knowledge, and generally holding the belief that there is a god greater than the Demiurge, or the creator of the world.
  Quotations
  Another contemporary scholar of Gnosticism, C. G. Jung, has taken this notion of the twin ray and applied it to his own model of the contrasexual nature of the self.
  1981, William Irwin Thompson, The Time Falling Bodies Take to Light: Mythology, Sexuality and the Origins of Culture, London: Rider/Hutchinson & Co., page 31