A valuable subsequent statement came in a reported conversation in 1976 in which Voegelin replied to a question, in part as follows:
I paid perhaps undue attention to gnosticism in the first book I published in English, The New Science of Politics. … I happened to run into the problem of gnosticism in my reading of Balthasar. But in the meanwhile we have found that the apocalyptic tradition is of equal importance, and the NeoPlatonic tradition, and hermeticism, and magic, and so on. [Still] … you will find that the gnostic mysticism of Ficino is a constant ever since the end of the fifteenth century, going on to the ideologies of the nineteenth century. So there are five or six such items — not only gnosticism — with which we have to deal.*
– Introduction, in Science, Politics, and Gnosticism: Two Essays (2004)
* Conversations with Eric Voegelin, ed. R. Eric O’Connor, Thomas More Institute Papers /76 (Montreal, 1980), 149. For a good survey and analysis of the other pertinent factors see David Walsh, After Ideology: Recovering the Spiritual Foundations of Freedom (1990; repr. Washington, D.C., 1995), 99-135, and the literature cited therein. The influence of the Gnosticism thesis is far greater than is commonly assumed. It can be seen without direct mention of Voegelin, for instance, in such disparate works as political scientist Zbigniew Brzezinski’s Out of Control (New York, 1993); the best-seller by Harold Bloom, Omens of Millennium: The Gnosis of Angels, Dreams, and Resurrection (New York, 1996); and the technical study by Nathaniel Deutsch, The Gnostic Imagination: Gnosticism, Mandaeism and Merkabah Mysticism (Leiden, 1995).