The Leftist-Gnostic connection

From Lawrence Auster's blog today:

Leading leftist writer dedicated his book to the devil

Quoted by Ann Coulter from David Freddoso's book on Barack Obama, here is the dedication of the first edition of Saul Alinsky's influential book, Rules for Radicals. Alinsky wrote:

Lest we forget at least an over-the-shoulder acknowledgment to the very first radical: From all our legends, mythology and history (and who is to know where mythology leaves off and history begins--or which is which), the first radical known to man who rebelled against the establishment and did it so effectively that he at least won his own kingdom--Lucifer.

Auster fails, however, to make the connection between the radical Leftism of Alinsky and the classical Gnostic revisionist mythology of the Biblical Paradise story, whereby the serpent becomes a messenger for the good God Who is radically beyond the cosmos, while Yahweh is redefined as an evil demiurge who constructed the cosmos in order to imprison the pneumatic "sparks" (i.e., those special human beings privileged to be Gnostics) that "fell" from the Beyond in the Beginning. Alinsky, thus, is so to speak padding his modern Gnosticism with choice bits from classical Gnosticism, no doubt gleaned from the general pool of modern, New Agey anthropology and comparative religion.