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The Demiurge is great and powerful. It is the god of this universe, identified in the Old Testament as Yahweh. But there is a higher God that came before the Demiurge, known as “the Father” in Gnostic cosmology. The Demiurge was the by-product of the Fall, when the Aeon known as Logos mistook itself for the Son of the Father and attempted to plug itself back into the Father. These Aeons of the Fullness are known as the First Order of Powers, created from the Son as his individualized traits and capabilities. When the Aeon called Logos Fell from the Pleroma of the Father and the Son, it left the ethereal realm and created the material universe in which we dwell.
Because the movement that brought about the Fall was not prompted by the Father, it lacks the lifeblood of the Father known as the Holy Spirit, and it lacks the power and names of the Aeons of the Fullness it left behind. What remains is the broken body of a dead Logos, consisting of the small, dark, and superficial imitations of the Aeons known as the Deficiency. Having forgotten the Father above and its brothers and sisters in the Pleroma, the Demiurge believes it is the first and only god and that none exists before it. Because of this amnesia, the weak and scattered bits of the Demiurge are no more than surface-level reflections of the Aeons above, lacking the power and abilities of the Fullness. The Demiurge controls these imitations with an iron fist, as they lack the capabilities needed to create and sustain the material universe without the guidance of the Fullness. The Demiurge gives the imitation the form Logos arrived with when it Fell, out of its own blueprint, and this is the design of our material universe. But the Demiurge is unable to confer life upon the imitations, as it lacks the Holy Spirit’s capability of infusing life into the mud.
We living creatures are called the Second Order of Powers, because we are the direct descendants of the First Order of Powers. We Second Order Powers do possess a memory of the Father and the Fullness; we remember the Paradise from which we came. The Gnostic gospel claims that we living beings are the fruit of the First Order of Powers sent here by the Aeons and the Son to do battle against the imitations of the deficiency, with the ultimate goal of winning over the fallen bits of Logos by bringing remembrance and virtue to the Demiurge. It is only by remembering the Father and Fullnesses that the Fallen Aeon may be restored to the Pleroma above.
But the battle with the imitation is difficult. We find ourselves in a never-ending war with ignorance and death. The Second Order Powers become sad and sick from constant battle and we pray to the God above for help. The Gnostic gospel says that the Pleroma and the Son, with the Father’s blessing, made a new fruit consisting of all of the Aeons and all of their capabilities, and powered by the Father’s Holy Spirit. This new fruit is called the Christ. This Christ is the Third Order of Powers, with more capabilities than the First and Second Orders because it reflects the entirety of the Fullnesses and the particularity of the consciousness of each of the individual Aeons, along with the power of the Holy Spirit and the Son’s full remembrance of the ethereal plane. This Third Order of Powers is fully equipped to bring remembrance and redemption to this fallen world and to the Demiurge. It is now in the process of bringing this memory to all corners of creation.
In order to allow the Christ to redeem the pieces of the Fall with which we do battle, we need to acknowledge the mission of the Christ and give it permission to carry out its redemption through us. This is the true mission of Christianity. Here is what it means to accept the Christ. The first step involves repentance, which is to say, acknowledging that you would like the Father’s help to defeat the agents of the deficiency. Once you do repent, you stop trying to run everything yourself, and you move your Ego off the throne and allow your Self to come into alignment with the Son and the Fullness. At this point, you will have a fuller gnosis of the Father and the Fullness above. Yet, even then you are only a Second Order Power doing battle against the forces of the Demiurge and other Second Order Powers operating under the Demiurge’s influence. As a Second Order Power, you do have more spiritual power than the imitations of the deficiency, but you can still be bloodied by the never-ending war with the imitation and the actions of deluded Second Order Powers.
By taking the extra step of inviting the Christ to sit on the throne of your personhood, you are enlisting the Third Order of Powers to do battle on your behalf. Here now, at last, you are fully protected by the force of the Holy Spirit working through the Christ and you have the power to overthrow the delusions of the Demiurge and the fear they engender. You are no longer working on your own, but you have the Third Order Powers of the Christ winning the battles through the power of love. Love is the secret weapon of the Christ. Without Christ on the throne, we Second Order Powers have a difficult time going against the vice, delusion, fear, and death thrown at us by the forces of the Demiurge. We tend to forget all about the goal of redeeming the enemy and instead fall into rage, engaging in battles of death and destruction. But the Christ does battle with weapons of peace, love, and forgiveness. The only aim of the Christ is to bring remembrance of the Father, the Son, and the Fullness, and this must be done by taking on each element of the fallen Aeon one piece at a time, one soul at a time, until the entirety of the fallen Aeon remembers and returns home to the Pleroma. Rage is not the answer; love is the answer.
You see, this is a fresh take on what it means to be a Christian. Not the historical church version that has been handed down since the purge of the Nicene Council in 300 AD, but the original version as taught by Jesus. When Jesus said, “I and my Father are one,” it is the God Above All Gods that Jesus refers to, not the angry, jealous god of the Old Testament. And when it is said that Jesus came to take away the sins of the world, this is manner by which it is done. Salvation comes not so much by the blood of Jesus on the cross, but by the infusing of the Christ into our souls.
If you would like to hear more details about Christ’s mission and the role that Jesus played in Christ’s appearance here on earth, please go to the gnostic insights dot com website and listen to the episode called Who, What, and Why Is the Christ? that you will find under the Complete Episodes tab in the site menu. And, if you are just joining us here at Gnostic Insights, I encourage you to listen to the first eight episodes of the series; you will find these under the menu tab called The Gnostic Gospel Primer.
The Christian church, as we know it today, is not the true church as founded by Jesus and his followers. The Gnostic position is that the institution of the church was hijacked by the Catholic Pope and Roman Emperor when they set up the Nicene Council to formalize Christianity. The Nicene Council stripped out the Gnostic scriptures from the New Testament so that followers of Christ would not be able to gain gnosis on their own, through direct communion with the Father and the Fullness. The church changed the structure of the believers from a common body of gnostic worshippers to a hierarchical structure based upon the Roman system of governors and subjects. They also hid the true nature of the Father, thereby swapping out Christ’s Father for the Demiurge. And they instituted a system of rituals and observances in place of giving glory to the Father.
When the Nicene Council stripped the gnosis from the New Testament at the direction of the Pope and the Emperor, they thought they were stripping all tell-tale signs of the Father and the Fullness from the religion. But, because of their own lack of discernment, these early bishops overlooked many passages that remain faithful to the original intent, if one only has the eyes to see. As a Gnostic Christian, these are the passages I attempt to illuminate in my gnostic insights podcast. Truly, you can take all of the words of Jesus and see them through gnostic eyes rather than two thousand years of misguided theology, and you will be able to find the fullness of the Christ.
I am not saying that it is impossible to love the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit from within the confines of the church as we know it. But it is much more difficult, because the gnosis has been stripped out of the church, leaving in its absence a series of unanswered questions and confusion that serve the Demiurge rather than the Father above. Indeed, it these Demiurgic aspects of the modern religion that turn people away from the church. The people leave in disappointment, not because they do not love God, but rather because they do love God and wish to know Him better.
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