A View of the World from Gravity Falls, Part III: Gnosticism, Gospel and Gravity Falls

Psychologists trained in the art of lie detection sometimes describe a phenomenon called “duping delight”—an intense, often uncontrollable thrill that people experience when they’re in the midst of a lie and getting away with it.  Often “duping delight” manifests itself in a nervous laugh or a fleeting smile that seems inappropriate to the context or the situation.  

The term was coined by Dr. Paul Eckman as a way of explaining the half-suppressed grins and other “micro-expressions of pleasure" he noted on people’s faces when they're trying to manipulate other people with lies.   Duping delight, he suggested, is the “pleasure we get over having someone else in our control and being able to manipulate them.”  Subsequent psychologists have connected it to the natural thrill humans experience when they exercise power.   Deception delights us, in particular, because it stimulates the neurological reward systems that are activated whenever we believe we have something that others do not have.

In other words, we are hard-wired to find a deep-down, often uncontrollable delight in secrecy, deception, and truth-hiding, because these things—the art of the dupe—make us feel powerful, knowing we know something that others do not.

“Duping delight” is a helpful concept as we continue this month’s theological analysis of Gravity Falls, the popular new animated series by Disney that’s a pretty big hit at my house.  To the extent that Dr. Eckman was on to something there, it helps us get at one of the unique aspects of the show, something that has contributed both to its popularity and to the endless speculation swirling around it on the internet (and not a few conspiracy theories, too).

I’m talking here about its use of the dupe.

Even a casual viewer of Gravity Falls—like, say, a father trying to keep up on the interests of three adolescent fans—will notice that it majors in deceptions, mysteries, and secrets of all kinds.  There’s the surface, of course: Grunkle Stan is a self-admitted con-artist running a phony “museum of the paranormal,” with the express intent of bilking tourists out of their hard-earned vacation dollars.  A number of the early episodes, in fact, lean heavily on this plot-device.  Stan’s arch-enemy is a phony child-psychic named L’il Gideon, himself a conman who uses fake psychic powers for his own bilking enterprises.   The dramatic finale of Season 1 leaned heavily on this plot-device.  Then, of course, there’s the mysterious, anonymously-penned journal (itself a riddle wrapped in an enigma) which reveals the hidden truths behind the deceptive “everyday” of Gravity Falls (nearly every episode leans on this one).

So that’s the surface.  But, as with all things Gravity Falls, there’s also the beneath-the-surface.  Peppered throughout the show are all sorts of mysterious ciphers, strange riddles and pseudo-cultic symbols.  Dipper’s journal itself is scrawled with them, as are the paranormal paraphernalia in the Mystery Shack.   Grunkle Stan sports an unexplained fez that's reminiscent of Masonic headgear.  The main villain in Gravity Falls is a disturbing demon named “Bill Cipher,” who bears an uncanny resemblance to the “All-Seeing-Eye” on the American dollar bill (yeah, the one that conspiracy theorists believe is a Masonic insignia).  Similar “triangle-framed-eyes” appear all over the place in the show’s background.

So that’s the beneath-the-surface; but there’s an even deeper layer here.  Every show, for instance, is littered with bizarre cryptograms and hidden messages, which only the most attentive viewers notice (see here for a list).  The opening credits always end with a backward message whispered breathlessly, which, if you've got the time and the interest to play it the right way 'round, gives away a clue about one of the characters.  And the closing credits, too, always show a cipher at the very end, which, if you enjoy that sort of thing, you can decode to learn something about an upcoming episode.

And then, of course, there’s this arcane-looking picture that flashes briefly at the start and end of every episode, and has generated more conspiracy theories online than chem-trails or water-fluoridisation combined.

On the one hand, it’s all this enigmatic symbolism that’s made some Christians skeptical about the show (see Part I of this series on that), but it’s also what’s made it especially popular.  The fun’s not just in the goofy gags and the interesting stories; it’s in all the deciphering and decrypting and detecting that carries on after each episode’s done.  The “delight” of Gravity Falls is, in fact, a kind of duping delight—the pleasure of knowing a hidden truth that others don’t because you were able to decode riddles that others weren't.

The word “occult,” of course, is so loaded with images of goat heads and spiritual evil that it’s hard to use it here without giving the wrong impression, but to the extent that the word simply comes from the Latin word occultus, meaning “hidden, or secret,” and to the extent that it literally just means “knowledge of the hidden,” we might suggest that it aptly describes the appeal of Gravity Falls.  The truest fans of the show—the ones who take the time to crack the codes and unscramble the letters—are rewarded—“delightfully” rewarded, you might say—with an insider’s knowledge of the hidden.

Gravity Falls, it turns out, appeals to the all-too-human pleasure we derive from knowing a hidden truth.  And, whether Stan’s Masonic headgear is anything more than a tongue-in-cheek gag, I suspect this is also the appeal of secret societies like the Masons, and conspiracy theories of all kinds, and the Occult of the worst kind—the supposed power that comes from having an insider’s knowledge of the hidden.

If this is making sense, then let me draw some theological lines between all this mystery, and the Christian Faith.  Because whatever else they believed about Jesus, the earliest Christians believed that in encountering him, they had come into contact with a mystery that had been hidden from the creation of the world.

Here’s a smattering of their writings on the subject: “[I want you to know] the Word of God, the mystery that has been kept hidden for ages and generations, but is now disclosed to the saints” (Col 1:26); or “[God’s intent was to] make plain to everyone the administration of the mystery which for ages past was kept hidden in God” (Eph 3:9); or “We declare God’s wisdom, a mystery that has been hidden [since] before time began”  (1 Cor 2:7).  And don’t get me started on the Book of Revelation, an apocalyptic vision that’s all about the hidden spiritual realities going on behind the veil of the everyday.

Like Gravity Falls, the Gospel, too, appeals to the all-too-human pleasure we derive from knowing a hidden truth, but with one big difference.

And it’s a difference that makes all the difference. 

Because unlike the kind of mystery that is the purvey of a show like Gravity Falls (or more importantly, the purvey of those darker things that Gravity Falls draws on superficially for its symbolism—secret societies and conspiracy theories and weird occult gobble-de-gook) the Gospel is not a mystery to be uncovered.  The Gospel is a mystery that has been revealed.  This is woven right down into the fabric of the New Testament, and is altogether different from “occult” mysteries, so called (however we define that word):  The Gospel is the Truth about Life that was once hidden, kept secret, but now, in Christ, is revealed to all, disclosed to all, and available to all.

In Jesus, God went public with the mystery of his intentions for the world.

This actually takes us right to heart of one of the very first heresies the Church faced.  It was called Gnosticism (from the Greek word, gnosis, meaning "knowledge"), and it specialized in "secret knowledge" about god, mysteries that only the initiated knew, and the outsider, especially, didn't.  In Gnosticism of all forms, it was this secret knowledge that saved.  Salvation itself was a mere matter of knowing and keeping secrets, and in the worst forms of Gnosticism, this "secret knowledge" devolved into the most convoluted, obscure and bizarre obfuscations imaginable.  A theologian named St. Irenaeus (ca. 200 AD) wrote one of the first and most decisive refutations of Gnosticism ever, and the title of his book sort of says it all:  On the Detection and Overthrow of 'Knowledge,' Falsely So-called.

Gravity Falls is not the worst form of Gnosticism, of course, but neither is it the only cultural phenomena these days that draws heavily on the delight—and the subtle feelings of power—we derive from believing we're on the inside of a secret.  From Harry Potter to "Paul is Dead" from Anonymous to Wiki-leaks, the list is long and varied.  Any theological analysis of Gravity Falls, then, would be remiss if it didn't at least point it out, how the Christian message both speaks to the power of the secret, but also disarms it.

Because the earliest Christians recognized how easily "spiritual secrets" can manipulate and ensnare and exploit the human heart; and more importantly, they believed that in Jesus, they had encountered a God who had gone scandalously public with his love for this hurting world—and because of these things, they kept insisting that the mystery of the Gospel was, in fact, an open secret, offered to any and all who had ears to hear it and a heart to receive it.

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