Esoteric Beat A Smoking Gun in McKennas Gnostic Astronaut talk

One thing I forgot to unpack is how McKenna saw the Mandaens as a positive version of gnosticism without the radical anticosmism -- he goes on in the alchemy talks to discuss alchemy as "optimistic" following the scholarly division between optimistic and pessimistic gnostic (which is used by Yates) which is why he sees "alchemical thinking" as an alternative to modern science, which is a "demonic enterprise" having in the process of disenchantment nevertheless smuggled across the Faustian pathology of Hermeticism, rooted in the negative or pessimist gnosis that leads to nihilism and the idea that anything goes so we might as well exploit the earth.