Studying those old books at their literal level is like trying to get a meal from the ash of the oven.
Gnosis, which is the ancient secret knowledge that leads to the direct personal knowledge of the mysteries of life and death, is something so profound, so ground-shaking, so deeply penetrating, and yet its truths and its mysteries are one hundred percent PRACTICAL, meaning that they are accessed not through the intellect or through ideas or even through belief: they are discovered only and exculsively through ACTION.
But do we have to interpret every utopia of a separation of the human body and mind as a kind of Gnosis?