The Concise Oxford Dictionary of World Religions (854 page)

 
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Gitanjali
(poem by Indian poet Tagore)
:

see
TAGORE, R.

 
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Glastonbury
.

In Somerset, one of the oldest English monasteries. Its history goes back to the 7th cent., but it became a famous Benedictine centre from
c.
940 under its abbot St Dunstan. About 1135 William of Malmesbury wrote its history, and in a 13th-cent. revision of this are the legends which associate it with
Joseph of Arimathea
, King Arthur, and St
Patrick
.

 
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Glebe
.

Land which belongs to the endowment of a parish and which provides an income from farming by the priest himself or a tenant.

 
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Gloria
.

The first word in the Latin, and hence the common name, of a Christian hymn. It begins with the words of Luke 2. 14. It is also known as the ‘Greater
Doxology
’ or ‘Angelic Hymn’. The ‘Lesser Doxology’, or
Gloria Patri
, is sung or said at the end of Psalms and
canticles
.

 
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(Gk.,
glossa
, ‘tongue’, +
lalia
, ‘speaking’). ‘Speaking in tongues’, the phenomenon, common in many religions, of a person speaking in words or word-like sounds which form a language unknown to the speaker. Related phenomena are
xenoglossolalia
, speaking in a foreign language unknown to the speaker but known to the hearer; and
heteroglossolalia
, speaking in a language known to the speaker which the hearer hears in his/her own language.

 
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Gnosticism
.

A complex of religious movements, having at least some of its roots in Jewish and pagan thought but appearing in developed form as a Christian
heresy
in the 2nd cent. Among the systems of that time, those of
Valentinus
,
Basilides
, and (somewhat apart from the rest)
Marcion
are the best known.
Among points of difference from mainstream Christianity are

(i) the distinction between the remote supreme Divine Being and the inferior
Demiurge
or creator god responsible for the imperfect and perverted material world;
(ii) the importance of
gn
sis
(‘knowledge’) as a means of redemption for at least some people (sometimes called the
pneumatikoi
, ‘spiritual ones’); and
(iii) a
christology
of Jesus as the emissary of the supreme God in
docetic
human form

.
The
Manichaeans
,
Mandeans
, and
Cathars
may be in various ways descendants of the gnostics. The autobiography of C. G.
Jung
shows the influence of gnosticism on his thought.