In the presented article, an attempt is made to explain the fact well known in literature on history of philosophy: the absence of even a minimally institutionalized variant of gnosticism, although this teaching itself, created in archaic Greece by early pre-Socratics in the form of the so-called protognosticism was widely used as a cognitive model in different historical epochs. The article contains argumentation of the thesis that the gnostic paradigm, being the result of individual and not collective reflection, emerges as a way to comprehend the crisis of the dominant cosmogony paradigm, and therefore needs neither socialization, nor institutionalization.