Reforming Gnosticism

When people say, “My goodness, your Gnosticism is so different than what I have come to understand Gnosticism to be,” that’s because I didn’t take it from secondary sources. I took it from the original sources.  Then of course, Valentinian Gnosticism is an early form of what has come to be called Christianity. Christianity diverged immensely from the original message around the 300’s and on up, when the gnostic books were taken out of Orthodoxy. Those folks that are called heresiologists are the people that went around slapping heresy labels on the early Christianity—the early Valentinian Gnosticism. They weeded it out of the official sacred texts that made their way into the New Testament.

The main book of the Nag Hammadi that I relate to is called the Tripartite Tractate. I believe it to be the purest form of gnosis. It has very little in the way of mythologies, of extraneous characters, of the names of things and the numbers of things and the astrology of it all.

Valentinian Gnosticism from the Tripartite Tractate is unique in that the fallen Aeon is not called Sophia, a female character. The Aeon who fell is called Logos, not to be confused with the Son of God, Christ, or Jesus.

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Tag: Restoration

  • Thumbnail for Matter is an illusion

    Gnostic Insights Podcasts, New Gnostic Gospel Simply Explained & Illustrated

    Matter is an illusion

    We call the result of the Fall the deficiency, commonly referred to as the material cosmos. Here’s the Sethian take on the structure of our cosmos:
    Yaldabaoth organized everything after the pattern of the first aeons that had come into being, so that he might create everything in an incorruptible form. (The Secret Book of John, verse 12)
    The Tripartite Tractate adds this caution to the construction of the cosmos:
    Those who came into being from the presumptuous thought resemble in fact the Fullnesses of whom they are imitations, though they are phantoms, shadows, and illusions, deprived of reason and light, belonging to this empty thought, being nobody’s offspring. (TTT, verse 78)
    We Second Order Powers were subsequently fruited into this material realm by the will of the Fullness in order to restore the fallen Aeon to the Fullness and bring this material creation to an end.
    Gnostics say that this material world was constructed by the Demiurge as a fallen imitation of the Paradise that exists on the ethereal plane. We think of this cosmos as being material in contrast to the ethereal nature of the originating consciousness of the Father, Son, and Fullness of God. But, as my brother needs to remind me from time to time, there is no such thing as matter. Matter itself is an illusion. In other words, there is no dualism.

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    Gnostic Insights Podcasts, Podcasts

    Episode 8 Redemption and Paradise

    The Aeons of the Fullness produced a Fruit bearing the image of their Father; and that Fruit–the Christ–took charge of the economy and proceeded to bring Redemption, one soul at a time.