Tag: gnostic cosmology
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The Generation of the Aeons and Logos
It is said that although the Father put an unquenchable thirst to align themselves with the One into the minds of the Fullness, he did not reveal to them the Father’s ineffable nature and the impossibility of reuniting with him and surviving to tell the tale. This was doubtless to keep alive the hope of reunification with the Father as a motive for continually giving glory.
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Introduction to A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel
And then around 2016, I read a copy of the Nag Hammadi Scriptures. At first I found the ideas shocking. These were the very heresies my conservative Christianity had warned me away from. According to Christians, these beliefs were excluded from our modern versions of the Bible to protect the church from theological misinformation. I discovered that radical repackaging had removed from the New Testament a type of spiritual belief that was well- known to Jesus and his followers. This belief system, commonly called Gnosticism, describes Christianity differently than does our modern Church. Gnosticism makes sense of most of the more mysterious aspects of Christianity, including humanity’s role in the great scheme of things, and common questions such as “why is there evil in the world?”
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The Son, Part 2: The Generation of the Aeons
Last week’s episode was supposed to be about the Son. But we’ve hardly heard anything about the Son himself. We hear about the Father being indescribable and we hear about the infinite number of spirits of the Church that form the body of the Son. But we really haven’t heard much in the way of descriptions of the Son itself. This is because the only way that the Son can be described is through the Aeons, which is to say, through the fractals that come out of the Son. As we trace the path of emanations flowing out of the inconceivable Father and through the barely conceivable Son, we become more and more concrete in our ability to understand the nature of God. It is when we enter the realm of the Aeons that we can begin to recognize the panoply of properties of the Father and Son.
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The Emanation of the Son and the ALL
The Son reflects the Father’s boundless greatness and love. The Son possesses every trait of the Father, for the Son is a complete encapsulation of the Father in which it dwells. Every trait of the Father is expressed now as a singularity, and that singularity is called the Son.
And yet although it was a singular manifestation of the Father, the moment the Son was formed, it was no longer alone, for not only the Son, but what is called the ALL, or the Totalities, arose at once. The ALL immediately appeared as the offspring of the Son, because the Son could not help itself from bringing others into existence, even as it was brought into existence by the Father.
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The God Above All Gods
I like to begin with the cosmos as it unfolded and rolled out. The word for that sort of study is “cosmogony,” which is defined as the study of the origins of the universe. This makes the most sense to me–to start at the very beginning and then to go through the entire process of how everything came to be and who the principal players are and then, after that is established, to see how that applies to our lives. Then we can ask, “Why are we here? Is there a purpose to our lives? How should we live?” After that, we can finally consider the termination of the universe and what happens after we die. All of these questions are answered very precisely in the Tripartite Tractate of the Nag Hammadi. This knowledge is known as “gnosis.”
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Redeeming the Demiurge and Creation
This episode finishes up our deep dive into the Tripartite Tractate’s explanation of the Third Order of Powers. We learn about their relationship to the Christ, the ALL, the Fullness and the Father, and how they go about their job of redeeming us Second Order Powers and the Demiurge.
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Third Order Powers–the Army of Christ
“Then from the harmony, in a joyous willingness which had come into being, they brought forth the fruit, which was a begetting from the harmony, a unity, a possession of the Totalities, revealing the countenance of the Father, of whom the aeons thought as they gave glory and prayed for help for their brother with a wish in which the Father counted himself with them. Thus, it was willingly and gladly that they bring forth the fruit.”
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Praise and Glory–Aeonic Romance
The Father loved and admired the Son, and the Son loved and admired the Father. These two were well pleased with themselves, and they gave praise and glory to one another. From their exchange of “kisses,” the ALL arose.
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“Why Are We Here?” A Listener Question
Why did the Fullness of God find it necessary to create the Second Order of Powers and send them (us) down here to redeem the demiurge? Why wasn’t the demiurge simply abandoned after the Fall?
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The Birth and Nature of Logos
A listener asks why it was necessary to populate this Fallen material world. Why not just abandon the Demiurge down here? Why send the Second Order of Powers into this rocky place on a mission of redemption? Why couldn’t we just stay up above in our ethereal Paradise?
Answering this question requires an in-depth explanation of the origin and nature of aeons. Cyd examines aeonic life as depicted by the Tripartite Tractate of the Nag Hammadi scriptures. Then we look at one aeon in particular, Logos, as we consider why it reached for the Father and Fell. -
Easter Message, 2022
The Christ has never fallen. The Christ didn’t fall. The Christ was a new fruit that came after the Second Order of Powers. The Christ came down voluntarily in order to save creation and return the entirety back up to the Fullness of God.
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Valentinian Theology Review
This episode discusses some of the differences and similarities between Gnosticism and Christianity and suggests that this Gnostic theology is what Jesus of Nazareth actually taught. Who is God? What is the original sin? Who and what is the Christ? Are you and your loved ones going to Heaven?
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The Demiurge’s Strings of Power
The Demiurge controls our material universe with strings of power, like a puppet master. There is no free will in the material controlled by the Demiurge. Free will is an attribute of the Father’s consciousness flowing down through living creatures from Above. This episode clearly explains the difference between the way the Demiurge controls matter versus how the Fullness of God creates cooperation for the betterment of all.
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Powers and Archons
Cyd translates the arcane language of the Tripartite Tractate into understandable words to describe the genesis of the archons and their relationship to the Demiurge and this material universe. Who or what are these “beautiful likenesses” that mistake themselves for the Aeons of the Fullness?
“The thought of the archons is not barren–all that they thought about they have as potential offspring: fighters, warriors, troublemakers, apostates, disobedient beings, lovers of power…”
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Christ–The 3rd Order of Powers
When Logos returned to the Fullness, his Pleroma was born out of the parts of himself that had become self-aware as a result of the Fall. These parts of Logos, his Pleroma, represented the better part of each and every piece of himself that had broken out and remained below as shadows of the Fall. It is the Fullness of the Pleroma of Logos that forms the body of the Redeemer who comes back down to the deficiency, one piece at a time, to restore love and memory to the Demiurge, helping him