Available from the publisher:

Lewis Masonic

The Canonbury Masonic Reasearch Center

The Canonbury Masonic Reasearch Center was founded in 1998 as a charitable trust in order to provide a unique environment for the study of, and research into, all aspects of Freemasonry, together with allied traditions, and to make the same available to the public.

The CMRC fosters learning through a programme of public lectures, seminars, and conferences, embodying the highest standards of interdisciplinary and comparative scholarship.

Canonbury Tower, which houses the CMRC, was built in the 16th century by William Bolton, Prior of the Canons of St. Bartholomew's. It is one of the London's most intriguing landmarks, and was once the home of Sir. Francis Bacon.

For further information : Canonbury Masonic Reasearch Center Website

'Knowledge of the heart' is what one knows intuitively, without church officials, creeds or canonical texts, to tell you what you are supposed to know. 
The subtitle, Gnostic Movements and Secret Traditions, suggests that such knowledge of the heart has been fostered not only in Gnostic movements, but also in other secret traditions.

Gnosticism as a term is modem, going back only to the mid-17th century (as pointed out by Robert Gilbert in his historical survey, and by Peter Forshaw), but it was coined to refer globally to the most important 'heresy' of the second and third centuries. Yet the term, thus applied, is inaccurate, for what was involved back then was a plurality of movements, part of a still larger cultural trend that Hans Jonas designated as the 'spirit of late antiquity'. But that spirit has continued, in various cultures and with a plurality of designations, down to the present.

The conference whose papers are published in the present volume had its focus on this more inclusive sense of Gnosticism flowing down through the centuries, both then and now.

But contributors consider other aspects of Gnosticism and the gnostic content of other 'secret' traditions. Such parallel Jewish strands as the Kabbalah, the Dead Sea Scrolls and Philo of Alexandria are addressed, respectively, by Leon Schlamm, Philip Davies and Madeleine Scopello. 

Roelof van den Broek shows how the intellectual milieu of Alexandria's Middle Platonism fostered just such spiritual transformation, while Sufism, which might be termed the 'gnostic' strand in Islam, is taken up by Richard Crane, and by Thierry Zarcone, who traces Sufi parallels in Turkish Freemasonry. 

But this 'geography of consciousness', as Colin Wilson presents it in his paper, can be traced on through the centuries. In the middle ages it survived in the persecuted sects of Cathars and Albigenses, and in the occult science of alchemy, as we see in Leon Schlamm 's paper, which also showed its reflection in the archetypes of Jungian psychology. 

Tobias Churton presents an argument for gnostic elements in Freemasonry, and a further presence of this type of secret tradition in modern times, within the Martinism of France, is traced by Roger Dachez.

The Eighth International Canonbury Conference set out to survey the vast panorama of the 'Knowledge of the Heart' to be found in 'Gnostic movements and Secret Traditions', and as these Transactions show, it succeeded admirably.