The Ancient Gnostics were an amalgamated class of unparalleled spiritual visionaries, intuitive parapsychologists, renowned scholars, experiential mystics, astral travelers, esoteric philosophers, cosmological entrepreneurs, illuminated moralists, and sophisticated pioneers of psychoanalysis. The orders of Gnosticism were heralded throughout antiquity for their original and refined conceptualizations on cosmology, human divinity, consciousness, historicity, the nature of God, psychology, and the nature of evil. The Gnostics were the academic backbone of the ancient universities residing in many as respected scholars, philosophers, writers, and theorists.
Gnostics are also possibly credited with the collation of ideas resulting in the Hermetic principles. However, due to their respected status as educated pagan teachers, eventually due to the unholy might of Christian Zealotry that burst onto the spiritual scene during the 4th-5th century C.E. combined with the acquiescence and conversion of the Roman Empire, the Gnostic Sages were subject to history's greatest spiritual genocide to ever ignite within the soul of man and were wiped from existence along with nearly the entirety of their holy works. The written records and works of Gnosticism were subjected to the first book burning in recorded history under the "Great" Christian Emperor Theodosius II and purged from the annals of history.
The Gnostics were extremely gifted seers and mystics with a profound vision for the unfoldment of humanity's spiritual evolution. Initiates of Gnosticism were the promulgators of particular cosmogonic variations within the ancient mystery tradition and one's unique even among Esoteric Orders. According to some scholars, the Gnostics were the mystics orchestrating the sacred Eleusinian Mystery rites and rituals during the early centuries of the first millennium after the Birth of Christ. The Gnostics were the master scholars, teachers, and philosophers of their time.
However, they were not a singular entity or school of thought but an aggregation of multi-disciplinary schools which promulgated a myriad of spiritual concepts that were intrinsically esoteric in nature. There were a variety of schools that existed throughout different regions of the world including ancient Persia, Egypt, Roman Italy, North Africa, Syria, Asia Minor, Palestine, and even parts of Asia. A number of these Gnostic sects rose to prominence during the 1st, 2nd, 3rd centuries AD such as the Valentinians, Sethians, and Manichaeans. Another less prominent but still pivotal sect was the Mandaeans or also referred to as the Sabians.
These varied sects of Gnostic Spiritual Thought had an exceedingly profound and original postulation on such topics as Cosmological Origination, Duality, Non-Duality, the nature of Consciousness, the Primordial Essence or Originator, the Abrahamic Deity Yahweh-Jehovah, spiritual parasites, the Material World, the Unseen Worlds, the nature of man, the Demiurge, and the nature of the Gods (Aeons) separate from the Prime Divinity. These Gnostic Schools were not in philosophical, cosmological, and existential agreement on these disparate topics, and in actuality they exhibited many divergent and inharmonious belief structures among their differentiated schools or sects, yet they were united in their pursuit of higher knowledge and experience.
Many of these Gnostic Schools, perhaps all, sought spiritual knowledge through what has been called the Path of Gnosis, or simply Gnosis. Gnosis was an experiential methodology for ascertaining an understanding of the higher or Unseen Realms as well as the material ones. It involved the acquisition of this knowledge through direct spiritual experience that was then cataloged and utilized for relational analysis of future spiritual experiences so that a qualitative data set could be procured.
Some of these Gnostic sects utilized psychedelic brews of sacred plants to dissolve the ego and disengage waking consciousness to operate in the deeper states of the unconscious and super-consciousness mind with the goal of perceiving the Unseen Realms. Others engaged in extremely deep meditative practices to effectuate an ecstatic trance whereby they could interact with Natural Intelligences both on the Higher Planes of existence and the Natural World, even potentially lifting the Veil of Isis to perceive or converse with the Sophianic Sentience of Gaia herself.
These profound, spiritually endowed Gnostic schools of thought originated and postulated a multitude of unparalleled, exemplary, and revolutionary treatises on existential philosophy, spirituality, cosmology, and parapsychology. They were some of the first to posit the concepts of the Aeons, the doctrine of emanations, the inimical nature of Jehovah, the parasitical Archons, the divine spark within humanity, and the sentient intelligence of the Earth. These ideas constituted a new evolutionary stream of spiritual understanding that was meant to enable the Anthropos species (Humanity) to properly align itself with the divine will of the Primordial quintessence as well as the terrestrial intelligence of Gaia-Sophia so we could actualize our divine potential.
Unfortunately, their mission of evolving humanity's conscious perception of its divine place on the Cosmic scheme was brutally interrupted by the conversion of the Roman Empire to Christianity. Once the Emperor Constantine converted and assumed a Christian standard for Rome, the descent into zealotry and ideological rancor was quick to manifest within the radicalized mentality of the Christian adherents, and ultimately within 40-50 years this warped, fundamentally dogmatic, preternaturally intolerant, and insular mentality began to exhibit malevolence and then belligerence towards any spiritual community considered Pagan. The advent of Theodosius I, often referred to as Theodosius the Great, to the emperorship of both the Western and Eastern Roman Empire in 379 cemented firmly this anti-pagan ideological sentiment with his initiation and instigation of decrees to dismantle, rebuke, and outlaw pagan groups.
Theodosius was the emperor that decreed Nicene Christianity as the official state church of the Roman Empire. Once the real violence began to manifest, Theodosius neither prevented, reprimanded, nor punished the subsequent ruthless brutality perpetrated upon the pagan communities. When the Christian fanatics began their sacrilegious destruction and desecration of the Hellenistic temples of classical antiquity such as the Temple of Apollo at Delphi and the Serapeum in Alexandria, Theodosius summarily ignored these atrocities with the instigators remaining entirely unchastised and unscathed. Instead, he subsequently dissolved the Order of the Vestal Virgins in Rome and following this in 393 he banned the Pagan rituals of the Olympics in Ancient Greece.
He decreed that all magistrates that did not enforce his new laws against polytheism be subject to criminal prosecution, and proceeding from there he instituted the Theodosian Decrees which were a comprehensive attack on non-Christians. The Theodosian Decrees stipulated the removal of non-Nicene Christians from church office, enacted the closure of Roman temples, confiscated temple endowments, banned or punished the practices of taking auspices and magical rites & rituals, refused to restore the Altar of Victory in the Senate House, authorized the destruction of non-Christian holy objects and images, and in 393 issued a comprehensive law that prohibited any public non-Christian religious customs. Theodosius was especially intolerant and oppressive to the Gnostic Order of the Manicheans.
Ultimately, even though these Gnostic Schools existed as disparate, disassociated, and distinct spiritual entities, with the ignoble rise of the Christian ideological Paradigm under Theodosius, which regarded itself as the Paragon of Spirituality, the differences between them were ignored by the Christian fanatics and every sect able to be reached was summarily eradicated, their message extinguished, and their profound works burned or destroyed along with their promulgators. Proceeding from this historical shift in consciousness from a lofty intellectual, inherently scholastic, and spiritually tolerant one to an intolerant and dogmatically naive one, the resulting historical repercussions manifested the western cultural descent into the Dark Ages of chaos, illiteracy, spiritual bigotry, cultural degeneration, scholastic stagnation, and intellectual repression. This ended the magnificent ascent of humanity's spiritual knowledge, understanding of consciousness, worldly progress, and divinely inspired cosmological perception for the next 1500 years in the Western hemisphere.
he Nag Hammadi Scriptures or Codices were a profound discovery for mankind's understanding of the Gnostic Schools of spiritual and cosmological thought which had been so readily destroyed by the rampant orthodoxy of the Christian Emperors and their Christian constituents during the late 4th century AD and into the 5th century. Until their finding, scholars had only a minute handful of accounts to rely upon for ascertaining an understanding of these unique spiritual movements referred to as Gnosticism collectively. Many of those previous accounts had been rendered by the very Church Fathers who were inherently adversarial to the Gnostic Sects, and thus were only reliable in their purposive delineation to illustrate their adversaries in a negative light through partially describing their supposedly aberrant spiritual ideas in enough detail to accentuate their points.
However, once the Nag Hammadi Texts were unearthed, scholars had direct access to their actual writings and concepts to begin formulating true, reliable assertions about what the Gnostics really believed and disseminated within their schools. Unfortunately, even though it was a large cache of documents hitherto unknown to humanity, they were totally fragmented and, in many ways, unfinished texts with large portions of them being damaged or missing parts in their narrative frameworks. Though they are incomplete and fragmentary accounts of these once great spiritual sages and their doctrines, they remain the largest and greatest Gnostic works available for anyone to garner a perception of their once illustrious and profound spiritual knowledge about humanity, consciousness, our origins, and their unique cosmological narratives.
There are over fifty texts within the Nag Hammadi Library and they can be readily divided into six different categories of Gnostic Literary Types: writings of creative and redemptive mythology or cosmology, observations and commentaries on diverse Gnostic themes, Liturgical and initiatory texts, writings primarily delineating upon the feminine deific and spiritual principle regarding the Divine Sophia, writings pertaining to the lives and experiential accounts of some of the apostles, and scriptures which contain sayings of Jesus as well as descriptions of incidents in His life.
The writings relating to creative or redemptive mythology include the Nag Hammadi texts about alternative versions of creation and salvation: The Apocryphon of John, The Hypostasis of the Archons, The Apocalypse of Adam, On the Origins of the World, and the Paraphrase of Shem. The writings corresponding to the observations and commentaries on various Gnostic themes are about the nature of reality, the Nature of the Soul, and the relationship of the Soul to the World: The Gospel of Truth, The Treatise on the Resurrection, The Tripartite Tractate, Eugnostos the Blessed, The Second Treatise of the Great Seth, The Teachings of Silvanus, and The Testimony of Truth.
The writings relating to Liturgical and initiatory texts include: The Discourse of the Eighth and Ninth, The Prayer of Thanksgiving, A Valentinian Exposition, The Three Steles of Seth, and The Prayer of the Apostle Paul. The writings which correspond to extrapolations upon the Divine Feminine Principle and the Divine Sophia include: The Thunder, Perfect Mind; The Thought of Norea; The Sophia of Jesus Christ; and The Exegesis of The Soul. The writings relating to the lives and experiences of certain Apostles include: The Apocalypse of Peter, The Letter of Peter to Philip, The Acts of Peter and the Twelve Apostles, The First Apocalypse of James, The Second Apocalypse of James, and The Apocalypse of Paul. Lastly, the writings corresponding to sayings attributed to Jesus and some of His Life Incidents include: The Dialogue of The Savior, The Book of Thomas the Contender, The Gospel of Thomas, The Gospel of Phillip, and The Apocryphon of James.
IT REVOLUTIONIZED OUR CONCEPTIONS OF GNOSTICISM
The Nag Hammadi Cache was discovered and unearthed in Upper Egypt in 1945 and is a collection of fifteen books, termed codices, which contained over fifty pivotal texts which had been thought to be lost or destroyed by the Christians during their vicious program of suppression and demolition of Pagan materials and their adherents which included the Gnostics. This was an absolutely pivotal and profound discovery which elucidated and illuminated a plethora of Gnostic concepts which had until this point greatly eluded proper extrapolation as well as understanding.
Most of these texts are considered to be specifically Gnostic in nature but also contained within this Cache were several texts relating to Hermeticism. These numerous texts were compiled, translated, and cataloged until the 1970's and were then subsequently published and disseminated to the public at large. They offered an entirely different perspective on the Gnostics than previously had been postulated by the few renditions provided by church Fathers inimical to these Gnostic Schools.
The conceptualization of the supreme Divinity within Gnosticism and its profound cosmology was one which was characterized apophatically, in terms of negation, being postulated as the Unknowable, the Unmanifested, the Unreachable, the impenetrable Light, the Unfathomable Essence, and the Unimaginable One. It was beyond the understanding or comprehension of finite beings. However, there is one way to postulate its conception which necessarily requires defining what it is not, and this apophatic conception was not unique to the Gnostics though it was elevated by them.
It is an Infinitely Unmanifested Essence lying behind all the various phenomena within the Universe. It is the Universe itself. It is unaffected by Time, without properties or attributes, without dualistic Polarity, unaffected by Manifestation, without Causal factors, without differentiation into Form, without Action, and without personality. It is the total potentiality of all these things without being subject to any of their constraining concepts. Imagine a center whose center is everywhere and its circumference is nowhere.
According to Gnosticism, the cosmology of the Universe, or at least our Galaxy, was generated through a concept called Emanationism. This process of manifestation through Emanations is not unique to the Gnostics but is also the premise postulated within Kabbalistic Cosmology as well through the Tree of Life Glyph of spheres.
The delineation of this form of creation involves a primordial flow of progressively more complex forces and forms that originate from the Primal Essence being intrinsically existent within this Primal Essence simultaneously.
It is a Pantheistic concept whereby the First Principle is imminent within all of its emanated life-forms and aspects of Existence while retaining its indivisible nature paradoxically. It is the opposite of evolutionism where the First Cause becomes differentiated into the Universe becoming essentially altered. It is a primordial starting point proceeded by a descent into lesser archetypal forms but retains its nature unchanged.
In Gnosticism, the Aeons are the divinely emanated aspects or expressions of the One Source's potentiality which is allocated to these Aeons for the purpose of creating new life-forms. These Aeons are in essence sentient divine creative frequencies of the One Source's varied attributes or expressions.
The Aeons were emanated into vibrationally energetic equalizing gendered pairs that intrinsically operate in a bi-lateral fashion to manifest life in the universe, according to the gnostics.
They must exist and effectuate their genomic experiments through the gendered equilibrium of unifying opposites or polarities precisely because the Natural Laws predicated by the One Source immutably require it for subsequent manifestations to arise at all. They are the propagators of life, seeding the Cosmos with a vast array of differentiated forms and disseminating them through panspermia.
The Pleroma is considered by the Gnostics to be the Divine plane where the Sentient Aeonic expressions of the First Principle reside and generate genomic experiments to proliferate the galaxy with life. It is considered by some scholars to refer to the absolute center-point of Galaxies where there is the concentration of light and plasma.
In Gnosticism, it is a place that is separate from the rest of the manifested realms and not subject to the same Cosmic laws of electromagnetism, gravity, materialization, and densification. The Aeonic beings that reside there send life out through a Panspermic process of dissemination typically not bypassing the boundary between their realm and the rest of the manifested Universe. It remained within the realm of potentiality for the Aeons to be able to vacate this Pleromic Zone but it is an atypical event.
The only known occurrence of this was when the Aeon Sophia descended from the Pleroma in an attempt to aid the failing Anthropine species in its future manifestation. Her descent from the Pleroma was unique situation within the Gnostic Cosmology and resulted in an Aeon becoming transmogrified into the Planet Earth, with her inherent Sentience referred to as Gaia.
According to many Gnostics, the Aeon Sophia, Goddess of Wisdom, was the benevolent creator of our genomic template the Anthropos. The Aeon Sophia is the vibratory energetic expression of the Infinite Unmanifested Source's emanated concept of Wisdom.
Sophia, according to certain schools of Gnosticism with their sophisticated Cosmological renditions, was the last emanation of the One Source and the youngest of the Aeons. She originally resided with the other Aeons inside the Pleroma, the galactic center, and she had a gendered consort called Thelete (Christos), and together they manifested organic genomic life-forms to propagate burgeoning worlds in the Universe.
Through bi-polar coordination they genomically engineered our primordial template which was termed the Anthropos. However, due to the failure of our initial manifestations to adequately handle our divine endowments of super-consciousness and creative imagination, Sophia became concerned and acted Unilaterally to aid our next manifestation.
She left the Pleroma journeying to future inception point, but this produced anomalous, dire repercussions for the Cosmos. The unfortunate result of her descent resulted in the accidental creation of the creature Yaldabaoth who became the eternal adversary of our race.
In Gnosticism, the Cosmic Being Yaldabaoth is an anomaly within the structural constitution of the Universe, specifically our region in our Solar System. This Entity corresponds to the Abrahamic False God Yahweh in the Biblical Theology. He is postulated by the Gnostics as Lion-Faced with a serpentine body.
His manifestation occurred due the unintended impact of the Aeon Sophia upon the chaotic celestial matter residing within the lesser galactic realms of existence. He was produced through a bizarre act that could be seen as an Abortion, and once arisen this Entity declared itself to be the Universal Originator due to its ignorance. Its constitution contained Pleromic fragments from Sophia's impact, which ejected him into existence, and was a powerful but arrogant and ignorant Entity.
It instigated a process of grotesque energetic duplication that produced simulacrums of it own nature which became known as the Archons. Subsequently, Yaldabaoth/Yahweh with his mimetic replicates nefariously initiated a scheme to imprison the Anthropic genomic vibrational template into a material from to harness it for energy. However, Yaldabaoth infused his pleromic fragments into the form and then sought to reclaim them. Thus, he instituted the Abrahamic religions as a deviant spiritual paradigm to control us.
According to Gnosticism, the Archons are inimical to the Human Species and our primary adversary. These Entities were manifested by Yaldabaoth through a monstrous and bizarre act of energetic self-replication. Yaldabaoth produced an indeterminable quantity of these freakish animated mutants. Like their Father, these Entities were like aborted fetuses in appearance as well as reptilian. They are in essence interdimensional parasites of an inorganic composition and described as non-physical by the Gnostics, hyperdimensional etheric automatons if you will.
They are not exactly alive but they have sentience of a sort. They also have been imbued with psychic abilities which they deviously employ upon Humanity. However, they are incapable of transgressing into the domain of Sophia, the terrestrial sphere, and attack humanity mentally and psycho-spiritually from outside the planet.
They effectuate these attacks by subtle emotional or psychological inception within our psyche working in groups that concentrate their powers upon individuals. Moreover, they instigate attacks through what John Lash terms simulation nemesis, VR mental simulations, which correlate to abduction scenarios. According to Mr. Lash these abductions, some of them, are powerful psychic simulations in the abductees mind and not a physical abduction. If they are phsycical I stipulate they are government operations.
In various Cosmological renditions of Gnosticism, Humanity has been referred to as the Anthropos or Anthropine Species. Our race was emanated by a divine gendered synthesis of the two primordial Aeons Sophia and Thelete. Their union manifested our genomic template termed the Anthropos, and upon its completion it was sent out into the burgeoning Cosmos to propagate various worlds including our own.
According to certain Gnostic accounts, our genomic template was imbued with special endowments from our Aeonic Progenitors. We were infused with a super-dose of Epinoia (Greek for thought, intelligence, creativity) and Nous (the Divine mind, Imagination) with both enabling our species to exhibit magnificent capacities for original creation.
Our Anthropine Species was imbued with a capacity for ascertaining divine knowledge of the Cosmos, the self, and the natural world we inhabit. Unlike the beliefs within the New Age Movement which stipulate that we can become Gods or like Gods, the Gnostics knew that while the Anthropos has the spark of divinity, it is not a god, but does have the divine capacity to garner higher knowledge on par with the Gods.
We can access divine knowledge not become a Divinity. The difference is huge. However, we are also subject to a plethora of limitations within our material confines for acquiring this divine knowledge.
The various Gnostic sects postulated several divergent concepts in regards to the Origin's of Evil, though some sects of Gnosticism exhibited spiritually aligned cross-overs on this pivotal question. Some Gnostics asserted that the Originator of Evil resided with the anomalous manifestation of Yaldabaoth and his legion of Archon replicates who became inimical to the harmony of the Universe as well as the Anthropos species.
In this postulation, Yaldabaoth with his Archons have deliberately, malevolently engineered a material construct where they imprisoned the Human race in a program of continual enslavement to regain their lost Pleromic Light essence when they inadvertently infused us with it before the story of Eden.
This version also delineates that the mainstream religious orthodoxies of Christianity Islam, and some Judaic ideologies were a deliberate inception within the human collective-consciousness structural paradigm for the nefarious purpose of diverting our spiritual inclination to false Religions with their deleterious doctrines meant to fragment the species in opposing sects.
Other Gnostic sects perceived the Demiurgic Yaldabaoth as only a material creator not necessarily adversarial to our race. In this conceptualization the Origin of Evil manifested out of human ignorance in understanding our intrinsic divinity and the true Primordial Originator. Furthermore, it originates from our conscious association with the material world and our physical bodies instead of realizing our divine nature within.
The Valentinian School of Gnosticism believed that at the beginning was a Pleroma, fullness, where resided the Primal Father Bythos that represented the origination of all things. According to Valentinain Gnostics, the Bythos, after ages of silence, emanated the thirty Aeons who were heavenly archetypes constituting fifteen syzgies or gendered complimentary pairs. They recognized the Aeon Sophia among them and portrayed her as the youngest Aeon. Sophia, after observing the many Aeons and how they are emanated, she returns to the depths of the Father seeking to emulate his emanatory power.
She enacts this without conjugal intercourse with her Aeon consort accidentally manifesting an abortion of a formless substance. She is then ejected out of the Pleroma and into the primal sub-stratum of matter. According to this Sect, Sophia's flaw, her inherent passion and curiosity, propelled her to impulsively fall out of the Pleroma which subsequently resulted in the manifestation of our world and our species, considered to both be flawed.
However, this fallen Sophia was in a way considered the daughter of Sophia, a Lesser Wisdom, while the other Sophia, higher Wisdom, remained within the pleromic realm. They identified the Old Testament God to be the Demiurge and the false, deficient creator of material reality. They postulated a redemptive work of Gnosis to realign man with his formerly divine nature, which was achieved by recognition of the true Father, the depth of all Being, as the true source of divine power in existence.
The Sethian School of Gnosticism attributed its Gnosis to Seth, third son of Adam and Eve, and Norea wife of Noah. There cosmology is most readily apparent within the Secret Book of John. Their Cosmogony and Genesis postulated a prelude to the original Judaic account. According to Sethian Gnostics, their Cosmological delineation began with the concept of an "Unknown" God or Divinity.
This Unknowable Divinity emanated the Aeons which were a sequential formation of gendered pairs of Beings. The Initial Aeon was Barbelo who co-acted in the proceeding emanations. The Aeons represent the various attributes of the Unknown Deity. Together they comprise the Pleromic World.
Then Sophia engages in an act of unilateral emanation which results in Yaldabaoth, the Demiurge. he steals some of his mother's power and uses it to create a material world in imitation of the Pleroma. To aid him he replicates producing the Archons, corollary of the fallen angels. He then creates Adam and inadvertently infuses his pleromic power into the being and then seeks to regain it.
He manifests the Eden of Paradise, placing Adam within it. Eve is created then from Adams rib in an attempt and effort to isolate and regain the light power he lost in Adam's creation. Yaldabaoth subsequently tries to rape Eve who now contains Sophia's light, but according to some texts he fails with Sophia's light being transferred into the Tree of Knowledge instead.
Thereafter, Adam & Eve are "tempted" by the serpent and eat of the Tree of Knowledge once more reacquiring the light the Demiurge had stolen from his mother. Yaldabaoth in rage hurls them down into the lowest realm of material manifestation.
Hermeticism is a divergent branch of Gnosticism. It is of an inherently more positive bent in regard to our reality and ability to transcend it. However, it does postulate a cosmology story. According to those hermetic gnostics, God is considered the ALL and is apart from matter, yet the Universe simultaneously resides within its being paradoxically. The ALL, through an act of will manifests primary matter which will constitute the Cosmos.
Out of this primary matter, God separates it into the four elements: earth, air, fire, and water. Then God utilizes these four elements to manifest the seven heavens: Mercury, Venus, mars, Jupiter, Saturn, the sun, and the moon which move in circles and govern destiny. The "Word" the leaps forth from the materializing elements, which were unintelligent. Nous then makes the seven heavens spin, and from them spring creatures without speech. earth is then separated from the waters with animals other than man manifesting.
The ALL then manifests androgynous Man after his vibrational pattern. Man observed the creation of Nous and received the authority over creation by the ALL. He rose above the sphere's path to better view creation and then showed the form of the ALL to nature. Nature fell in love with the All, and man, seeing his reflection in water, fell in love with Nature and wished to dwell in it. Man, subsequently became One with nature and subject to its limitations.
Through this event man became speechless, having lost "the Word", and became a bi-pol or double being, mortal in body yet immortal in spirit, and having authority over creation but subject to destiny now
The Mandaean Gnostics did not readily postulate an exact cosmology but had various descriptions of it. However, there are particular ways to comprehensively delineate its more pertinent aspects in their Gnosticism. They postulate a primal formless Entity that manifests its expression through the creation of spiritual, etheric, and material worlds and beings to propagate the Cosmos. The manifestation of these is then delegated to a creator or creators who originated it. The Universe is manifested by Archetypal Man who manufactures it through a similitude of his own nature.
There is intrinsic duality within this Universe through a father and a mother, Light and Darkness, a syzygy in cosmic and microcosmic form. An aspect of this requisite duality is the manifestation of countertypes and a world of ideas.
Furthermore, the soul is characterized as being an exile and a captive. Her home and origin are postulated as being the Supreme Entity to which she will eventually return to and be reabsorbed. The planets and the stars presumably regulate fate and human beings acting as manifested planes of detention after a material form has expired. There is also a savior spirit or savior spirits which engage in an act of assistance towards the soul to aid her in the trials of life and the subsequent journey upon death to the "worlds of light".
Other fundamental tenets of Mandaeism are a cult-language of symbols and metaphors which are personifications of ideas and properties. Moreover, they are intricate Mystery rites and rituals which are generated to assist and purify the soul, to ensure her rebirth into a spiritual body and aid her ascent and extrication out of the material realm. The rites and rituals are enacted during seasonal periods and constitute adaptations of certain esoteric interpretations to be understood by initiates.
The postulated cosmology is not easily ascertained but can be stipulated in the following description. The Great Living God is called Hayyi Rabbi. He emanates three manifestations of himself. They were Yushamin, Abathur, and Ptahil. Each is an aspect of the Demiurge in a way. Ptahil doesn't really constitute the Demiurge but is the creator of the Material World. Abathur's demiurgic role manifest in his position of sitting in judgement of mortal souls. Yushamin is more obscure but essentially, he sought to emanate a world of his own and was severely punished by the King of Light for His opposition.
He and his name can be seen as perhaps being a derivative of Yahweh due to its being closely worded and linguistically relational in particular ways. The Mandaeans did postulate that the world is a prison governed by planetary Archons but did not believe this material world we reside upon to inherently be a cruel or inhospitable place for humanity's growth and subsequent development to transpire.
The cosmological delineations of Basilidean Gnosticism have rather divergent accounts depending on which individual it is gleaned from be it Irenaeus or Hippolytus. Irenaeus postulated his version positing that the Baslilidean's doctrine was emanationist and dualistic. Comparatively, the version extrapolated by Hippolytus was pantheistic and evolutionist.
The cosmological account most likely disseminated by Basilides himself and his Gnostics is as follows. The beginning of all things started with pure nothing. There was essential "non-existence" and "non-being" and Hippolytus utilizing every single phraseology to construe the idea and essence of existence as an absolute "nonentity". The unmanifested Deity willed a non-existent world to arise out of non-being things. The non-existent world was only "a single seed containing within itself all the seed-mass of the world," like an apple seed contains the branches and leaves of the tree.
Within this seed-mass were contained three parts, or sonships, and were inherently consubstantial with the negativity of God. This was the one essence and one origin attributed to all future manifestations of growth. These future manifestations did not utilize pre-existing matter but rather these future manifestations came into being out of nothing through voice, Logos, of the Unmanifested Deity.
The first Sonship correlates to the part subtle of substance and constitutes the first part of the seed-mass burst forth and ascended to the Unmanifested Deity. The second sonship correlates to the part course of substance and constitutes the second part of the seed-mass bursting forth incapable of ascending up of its own accord, but it took to itself as a wing of the Holy Spirit with each one bearing up the other in mutual benefit.
However, when it encountered the place of the first-seed mass and Unmanifested Deity, it could take the Holy Spirit no further due to its essence not being consubstantial with the Holy Spirit. There the Holy Spirit remained as a firmament dividing the world above from the world below.
The third Sonship relates to the Great Archon and part needing purification. The third part of the seed-mass burst forth into a Great Archon that ascended until he reached the firmament which he thought was the end of all things. There he "made to himself and begat out of the things below a son far better and wiser than himself". He became wiser and greater than all cosmic things except for the seed-mass below. In wonder at his son's, he set him at his right hand. "This is what they call the Ogdoad, where the Great Archon is sitting".
Then all heavenly etheric creation, as far down as the moon, was made by the Great Archon, inspired by his son. Another Archon arose out of the seed-mass inferior to the first Archon, but superior to all else below except the seed-mass and made a son too wiser than himself who became the creator and governor of the aerial world. This region is called the Hebdomad. However, all these events occurred according to the plan of the not-being God.
The Manichean Gnostics had an elaborate alternative postulation for the nature of our Universe. In their Gnosticism, it was delineated that the Cosmos exists in inherent dualism with opposing powers of Good and Evil which are constant antagonism. The Good God is powerful but not Omnipotent and eternally Opposed by the Evil Devil.
They taught that Man, the world, and the soul are the byproduct of the battle between God's proxy, Primal Man, and this Devil. Mankind is where the battle between good and evil are effectuated with his soul under the influence of both opposing powers.
Also, there were three Creations not one. In the first creation the realms of Good and Evil were separated with the World of Light being ruled over by The Father of Greatness and his five Shekinah's, light attributes, and the Dark realm ruled by the King of Darkness. This King eventually noticed the Light world avariciously attacking it. The Good of Light contacts the mother of Life and she sends Original Man to battle the King with 5 shields of light which he loses to the dark forces during the battle with them being absorbed by the forces of darkness and awakens to find himself ensnared in darkness.
This necessitates that the Great Father then initiates a second Creation. He calls to the Living Spirit who then seeks aid from the Father's Five sons who send a call to Original Man who subsequently sends an answer. Then The Mother of Life, the Living Spirit, and his five sons manifest a new Universe utilizing the Dark beings and the light they have absorbed. This creates ten heavens and eight Earths with an aggregation of these various dark material beings and swallowed light attributes. The sun, moon, and stars are manifested through the recovery of this stolen light.
Then the Great Father begins the third creation by first hanging out the Great Demons, Archons, among the heavens. The Light is then subsequently recovered from the physical bodies of the female and male evil beings & demons through arousing their sexual desires by portraying provocative images of light beings. The light is expelled falling to the Earth, yet the evil beings continue to absorb the light in huge quantities and copulate creating Adam and Eve.
The Great Father then sends the Radiant Jesus to reawaken Adam to his inner light imprisoned with his material form. Unfortunately, Adam and Eve mate and produce more humans thus differentiating the trapped light further among humanity. Then they continue to reproduce among themselves with the imprisoned light becoming enormously individuated throughout all the multitudes of the humans created through these continued unions of the sexes. This obviously created a huge problem for the reconstitution of the light to occur and ascend back to the Great Father.
The Gnostic Syncretist
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