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A podcast listener recently asked me to amend my categorization of the Demiurge as a malevolent force. He asked me to read the “Epistle to Flora” from The Gnostic Scriptures to see that the Demiurge is a force for good on the right hand side of the ledger. In other words, is the Demiurge evil or good? Turns out it’s a controversial subject in the Gnostic community. That is what we consider on today’s podcast.
For the past couple of weeks, we’ve been talking more about the Demiurge because one of the Gnostic Insights listeners wrote to me and asked me to clarify this business about the Demiurge because he feels that I’m too hard on the Demiurge and I shouldn’t think of the Demiurge as evil but as just. He recommended that I read the “Book of Flora” which is contained in Layton and Brakke’s book called The Gnostic Scriptures. It’s by a Greek philosopher named Ptolemy who wrote around 150 AD.
And so for the past few weeks I’ve been reconsidering my position on the Demiurge, and I’ve reread parts of my book to see if I got it wrong. And I don’t think so. I think that indeed, the creator of this earth that we live on and all of the dead things—that would be the mud, the particles, the molecules up through the elemental level and the aggregations of rocks—Demiurge means architect, it means builder, and so Demiurge is a fine word for the creator of this universe. But is this creator the ultimate God? The God that we think of as Father in Christianity, for example. And that answer is no. This God is a lesser God, an intermediate God.
And when we look at the Old Testament and we look at the stories of how God interacts with humans, that God is very wrathful, is very angry and seems to have no problem with wiping out large patches of humans. So it’s hard to think of this as a loving God, but can we think of the Demiurge as justice as a just God? And this is what our listener was attempting to convey to me—that the Demiurge is not evil. The Demiurge is not Satan. The Demiurge, this blind justice. So let’s think about that.
Jumping out of that train of thought for just a moment, I wanted to bring you up to date on an interesting archaeological find. I read this this week in the news that the earliest original Hebrew writing was discovered by archaeologists recently. It’s a 3200 year old amulet. The oldest example of Hebrew writing, and it carries the name of Yahweh written out. And it’s called a curse tablet. This was found on Mount Ebal, near the biblical city of Shechem, and it’s what’s called a curse tablet. Apparently Mount Ebal was known from Deuteronomy 11:29 as a place of curses, and there was a big debris pile, which the archaeologists think is an altar, and within this pile of rubble they found this curse tablet. It was perfectly preserved. It was actually a metallic object and the curses were written in the metal itself and that’s why it survived. And according to this book of the Old Testament, Deuteronomy, priests and Levites were instructed to send curses in the direction of Mount Ebal. They’re supposed to stand in the valley between Mount Ebal and Mount Gerizim, and send curses in the direction of Mount Ebal. So this object is lead and it had curses written in lead on the inside of it, and they used a CT scanner to bring up the letters because it was too delicate to actually open up this little amulet where the curses were written. But here’s what the phrase says inside in Hebrew: “Cursed, cursed, cursed, cursed by the God Yahweh. You will die. You will surely die, cursed by Yahweh, cursed, cursed, cursed.” OK, so this is an extremely important historical find because it dates Hebrew writing to these Old Testament days so that they actually could have been writing their history, that it wasn’t just oral traditions passed down. 500 years older than any other previous appearance of the word Yahweh, centuries older than previous record holder for the oldest Hebrew text in Israel.
Now, that’s a pretty interesting find, but what’s interesting to us here at Gnostic Insights is this idea. That if Yahweh were actually the God Above All Gods, or the Father of Jesus, the God of love, from which all virtue and love and righteousness emanates, what’s he doing standing around telling people to curse other people, or telling a mountain to be cursed? First, Yahweh throws curses around and kills people and tricks people and tortures people. That not the Father, not the God Above All Gods. And this is the God that we here at Gnostic Insights. Believe to be the God Above All Gods, the Father of all love, whom Jesus referred to as Father. And in contrast, this Yahweh, that is mentioned on this ancient lead tablet now, he’s a God who does not bring love but brings curses.
So back to this idea. What is the Demiurge and should we think of the Demiurge as Yahweh and should we think of this Demiurge as evil? Seems a bit evil to go around cursing others. Condemning them and killing them. That’s what we might call evil. Alright, I’m not sure that that is simply justice, although we do get caught up in the idea of capital punishment, don’t we? That an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth? That’s Old Testament talk. See, that’s talk that is handed down by Yahweh. So when people say as indeed my listener did, that the Demiurge or Yahweh is directed through Logos, is directed through the Fullness of God, without its realizing that it’s being directed. See, the Demiurge Yahweh woke up in ignorance after the Fall, not remembering where it came from, not knowing who it was, and so when it said, “let there be light,” it thinks it’s creating the concept of light. And when it created the world, it thinks it is the sole creator of all of creation and of everything that has come to be, because it’s deluded into thinking that it is God and was unengendered—that is didn’t come from someone.
So again this listener asked me to read the Book of Flora and to come away with a kinder idea of the Demiurge to not be evil, but simply as justice. And so let me share a bit of this epistle to Flora with you here. So from Brakke and Layton’s introduction to the Epistle to Flora in The Gnostic Scriptures. They say, “one can distinguish, Ptolemy concludes, a perfect God who is good, also the God of Israel and the Old Testament who is just, and the devil who is evil.” So we’re talking about three different gods that Ptolemy is proposing. He carefully contrasts this view with positions that assert only two principles. That is, the God and the devil, which is the typical Christian point of view, and also the typical Hebrew point of view. In comparison Ptolemy’s tripartite scheme shows a relatively positive attitude toward the Craftsman, or the Demiurge. Which is the creator of the world and the God of Israel. They say some classic gnostic scriptures also follow the same tripartite scheme.
In the opening of the Epistle Ptolemy sets out to refute the other two opinions on the source of the Old Testament law. One opinion identified the legislator with the highest God. We’re talking about Old Testament law. You know the 10 commandments, but then all the other commandments that are printed in the Old Testament, as well, such as in Deuteronomy. Others identify, they say, the legislator with the devil and many scholars believe it may be the gnostic opinion who followed a myth of the Craftsman of the world called Yaldabaoth, who appears to be identical with the God of Israel, but they’re not sure of where that opinion came from. They’re just supposing it was Gnostic.
So here’s the beginning of the letter to Flora. And Flora was a Christian woman, and Ptolemy was writing to her to clear up some ideas. So quoting verse 33.3.1,
The law established by Moses, my dear Sister Flora, has in the past been misunderstood by many people, for they were not closely acquainted with the one who established it or with its commandments. I think you will see this at once if you study their discordant opinions on this topic. For some say that this law has been ordained by God the Father, while others following the opposite course stoutly contended that it has been established by the adversary, the pernicious devil, and so the latter school attributes the craftsmanship of the world to the devil, saying that he is the Father and maker of the universe.
Verse 3334 goes on to say,
Now it does not seem that the law was established by the perfect God and Father, for it must be of the same character as its giver. And yet it is imperfect and needful of being fulfilled by another, and contains commandments in congress with the nature and intentions of such a God.
And I would agree with that. You see the behavior of God has to be in keeping with its character. And if we’re talking about the God Above All Gods, the character of God is love and light. The character of God is communion, virtue—all good things come from the character of the God Above All Gods, the Father, and they emanate out into the Son and the Son emanates them out into the Fullness or Holy Spirit of God. Now you can’t get from these emanations to a God down here below on Earth, who writes commandments that go opposing to that or that behaves in the way that Yahweh often behaves in the Old Testament. Yes, many Christian sermons are about the Old Testament, particularly those of a Christian denomination called Jehovah’s Witnesses, who are Yahweh’s witnesses. They are the worshippers of Yahweh here currently on Earth, in addition to the Old Testament Hebrews, the Orthodox Hebrews, who continue to worship Yahweh since he became their tribal God. But we have stepped out of that tradition of worshipping Yahweh for the most part. We prefer to worship the God Above All Gods over all other gods, including Yahweh. And this is a God of love and of perfect peace and harmony. So Ptolemy was speaking of that when he was saying you can’t have commandments that are incongruous with the God Above All Gods, if they really come from God, therefore they must come from a different God. From a lower God. A different source. Which many of the ancient Gnostic traditions believed to be an evil God, the Demiurge they categorize as evil, Yaldabaoth evil.
Now the book of Flora is interesting in that Ptolemy goes into quite a bit of detail to show how exactly the various laws of the Old Testament laid out that there’s three different sets of laws. One set of laws can be said to be directly from God, one set of laws from Yahweh through Moses, and the other set of laws were created as cultural artifacts by the Hebrews, their laws having to do with society with how to run society. Most of the thou shoulds and should nots that are contained in the law book, and those aren’t necessarily from any God, but they’re through man in the name of God. And so he talks about these various types of laws and how they’re different from one another. And if you’re interested in those details, it’s not a bad logical argument. I recommend that you read the Book of Flora, beause I’m not going to go into it here.
But skipping down to the final part of the Book of Flora, which is verse 33 under the headline of The Nature of the God who is the author of law, (and that God who is the author of the law, that we would say is Yahweh, by the way). So what Ptolemy says is the lawgiver is an intermediate God,
for since this Division of the law that is God’s own law was established neither by the perfect God as we have taught, nor surely by the devil, which it would be wrong to say. Then the establisher of this division of the law is distinct from them, and he is the Craftsman and the maker of the universe or world, and that the things within it, since he is different from the essences of the other two, rather is in a state intermediate between them. He would rightly be described by the term intermediate. He is neither good nor evil, merely just. And if the perfect God is good according to his nature, as indeed he is, for our savior showed that one only is there who is good. (That’s a quote from Jesus, from the New Testament through Ptolemy, namely his Father, whom he manifested. We’re talking about Jesus being the physical manifestation of the son of the Father,) and if furthermore, the law belonging to the nature of that adversary is both evil and wicked, and is stamped in the mold of injustice.
(This and that is all proven through Ptolemy’s discussion in the Book of Flora that I refer you to),
then a being that is in a state intermediate between these and is neither good nor evil or unjust might well properly be called “just,” being a judge of the justice that is his. He is engendered in the image of the good God. And on the one hand, this God must be inferior to the perfect God and less than his righteousness, precisely because he is engendered and not unengendered.
And remember the God Above All Gods is the base state. It’s the ground state of consciousness. No one gave birth to the Father The Father is the unengendered ground state of consciousness. Everything that emanates from the Father is called engendered, meaning born from him. There is one unengendered Father, from whom are all things flow.
Or more exactly from whom all things depend, and on the other hand, he must have come into being as better and more authoritative than the adversary, and must be born of an essence and nature distinct from the essence of the other two, for the essence of the adversary is both corruption and darkness, for the adversary is material and divided into many parts, while the essence of the unengendered Father of the entirety is both incorruptibility and self existent light. Being simple and unique. And the essence of this intermediate produced a twofold capacity for he is an image of the better God.
That’s from the book of Flora. So what is this saying? That the Demiurge is a reflection. The Demiurge, remember, is a likeness of the Father. Is a likeness of the Son. Is a likeness of the Fallen Logos, who himself was a fractal of the Son. So the Demiurge is not an image because the images are the Aeons we talked about that last week, so he’s not a direct image out of the Fullness of God. The Demiurge is a likeness of God, but he is not God to us. It may be God to the Jehovah’s Witnesses. The Demiurge is God because look, he’s the Creator of the heavens and the Earth. That’s a pretty big field.
But I think that when we are in church or in a reverent and meditative state, meditating upon holiness, that what we are praying to, what we are meditating upon, what we are giving glory to, the Holy, Holy, Holy, isn’t the Demiurge. That’s a mistaken notion. In our heart of hearts, we 2nd order Powers come from the Fullness of God, so in our heart of hearts, we are giving glory to the God Above All Gods, the originating Father, and to the Son of that God Above All Gods, who is the encapsulation, the monad that represents the God Above All Gods. The Father that Jesus refers to can be either the Son or the Son’s Father because the Son was also a Father. The Son engendered the Fullness of God. So when the Son split into the Fullnesses of the Aeons, the totalities, the Son also became a Father. So we can think of the Son of God as Father. He’s the relatable God. The God Above All Gods is untouchable.
We can give glory to the God Above All Gods, but as Logos learned when he attempted to launch himself back into the realm of perfect glory, that will result in a stumble and a Fall instead, because we don’t have the capacity. We could say in religious terms we are not worthy to approach God the Father. It’s not that we are so much unworthy as it is that we are incapable of approaching the Father. That God Above All Gods. But we are very much capable of approaching the Son because the Son is the relatable Father that we were meant to be in contact with. We are children, or fractals, of the Son of God. We’re fractals of combinations of the Aeons that live in the Fullness of God. We are their children. We are their fruit.
I do like to listen to radio preachers when I’m driving in the car. I like hearing the gospel preached. Now, sometimes preachers get things wrong when they’re delving in and grabbing things out of the Old Testament, because the Old Testament is ruled by a lesser God, that being the Demiurge. The New Testament is ruled by the God Above All Gods, and the Son of God, the emanations of that line of holiness. Through the Son of God through the Aeons, through the Christ which was created in order to bring us second order powers back home. We are down here on this material plane. We need to go back home to the spiritual plane from whence we came, and it is the Christ that brings us home. So when I say we are unworthy or there is talk in the New Testament that all of our righteousness is as dirty rags, we are unworthy, we are but worms—that’s referring to the material nature to which we are bonded here on the material plane.
I wouldn’t equate that with being a world hater. It’s OK to be joyful in creation. It’s OK to love particularly all of the living things around us, because remember, all living things come from above. All, living creatures are second order powers. It’s the life of this creation, the life that is coming down from above. What we love is life and light. We love the Fullness of God even in its bounded form, even it in its. you know, I want to say captured form down here below bonded to the material plane because the material plane is the realm of the Demiurge and the Demiurge’s creation. Not the birds and the bees and us. What the Demiurge created was the material, the particles, the atoms, the molecules, the elements, the aggregates of minerals. That is the realm of the Demiurge, the planets the stars. It’s a beautiful realm. These things are beautiful, but they are the realm of the Demiurge, which means he’s in control and the Demiurge rules that realm with strict laws, strict laws of physics, strict laws of chemistry, strict laws of motion. And the laws of the Demiurge that come to us from the Old Testament.
These are strict and unyielding laws of behavior, and so yes, I can agree with the listener that the Demiurge represents justice, blind justice, unloving cold justice. Justice that doesn’t take into account excuses and pleas and cries and tears. It’s cold, hard justice. The justice, on the other hand that comes from the God Above All Gods, that comes from the Fullness of God through the Christ, that is a justice that includes love and forgiveness. Jesus said none are worthy. No, not one, but all are loved and all are forgiven. So the kind of justice that would send most humans to hell for eternal damnation. What does that sound like to you? Does that sound like the justice of a loving God, the justice of the Father? It doesn’t sound like it to me. The God that condemns humans to death and torture for eternity, so-called, that is the Demiurge. The Father of the Christ and the anointed, the Messiah, comes to give us forgiveness, comes to give us love, comes to say, yeah, I know that your righteousness is as dirty rags. Yeah, I know that you’re really no higher than the worms. But you know what? I love you. Anyway, you know what? I forgive you. Your sins are forgiven. You’re not going to hell. I love you. Come with me. Back up into the eternal realm where you will have peace and joy and love and rest.
Even rest for the wicked. Because the things burned up down below, those are the memory of the wickedness, the sins, the bad acts, the vices. That is what stays below down here and gets burned up by the fire. We’re all creatures of the God Above All Gods. We are the creation of the Fullness of God. We are their fruit, and we are coming home. All of us, none will be lost. That is not lessening the power of the Christ. That is not lessening the power of God. That is acknowledging the great glory and love of the God Above All Gods.
But now lastly there was a third character mentioned here by Ptolemy, and that character is the accuser, Satan. Let’s not conflate the Demiurge with Satan. Satan is another character. Satan is the accuser. Satan is an Archon, probably the chief Archon and these Archons are the sub selves, or the likenesses of the pleroma of the Demiurge, their likenesses of the pleroma above. So, as the Pleroma is to the Son up above and the Logos also was a fractal of that, he had his own pleroma that looked just like the full pleroma in the Son, so that pleroma was Logos sitting on top of his own little pleroma and they were fractals of that larger pattern. And the larger pattern didn’t fall. It was Logos who fell, and down here below it is the likeness of the Fallen Logos that is the Demiurge. The best part of Logos fled back up to the Fullness and is working with the Fullness. They’re the ones that cooked up the Christ to come and save us from the Fall and to come and save the Demiurge from the Fall, because the Demiurge isn’t going away to nothingness either.
The Demiurge is not inherently evil. The Demiurge is like the ego of Logos that got stuck down here below and thought he was Logos and thought he was God thought he was the pleroma of the Fullness. All wrong about all of that. He’s just the shadow of them. He’s a knockoff of the fractal of Logos and the fractal of Logos is a fractal of the Fullness of God. So that’s how it all works. That’s the stacking. Those are the stacked layers. Satan is an Archon, he is a sub self. We liken this within the pleroma of the Demiurge. The Demiurge itself is this full unit of the Fallen ego of Logos. The Demiurge was able to construct this world so perfectly because it does contain within itself all of the patterns and fractal formulas of the Fullness of God, but it doesn’t remember where it came from. It thinks that it is the end all, be all.
OK, I hope I have not muddied the waters here. I hope I’ve got some clarity. God bless us all. We say onward and upward because we’re heading back home to the Fullness. See you next week.
