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: the Demiurge

  • Thumbnail for The Demiurge and the Boundary

    Gnostic Insights Podcasts, New Gnostic Gospel Simply Explained & Illustrated, Podcasts

    The Demiurge and the Boundary

    Logos appointed an Archon to bring order to the chaos. This Archon is what we call the Demiurge. The Demiurge is able to control matter. “The things which he has spoken he does.” The book of Genesis attributes these actions of the Demiurge to Jehovah when it says, “God saw all that he had made, and it was very good.”
    The Demiurge is in charge of the mud, the material, the hard rocky places–at the small scale the dirt and the elements, and at the large scale the rocky planets and the stars in the heavens. If there are creatures on a planet, they coat the outside of the dead rocky planet. Life only comes from the Father. Life is top-down.

  • Thumbnail for “Why Are We Here?” A Listener Question

    Podcasts

    “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?

  • Thumbnail for The Birth and Nature of Logos

    Podcasts

    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.

  • Thumbnail for As Below, So Above: Inferring the Transcendent

    Gnostic Insights Podcasts, New Gnostic Gospel Simply Explained & Illustrated, Podcasts

    As Below, So Above: Inferring the Transcendent

    If we start with the premise of a singular consciousness that pre-exists everything that came after it, then we can follow the genesis of our universe from that consciousness step-by-step. In today’s episode, we are going to map aspects of our human personalities onto the Gnostic Gospel to see what we can infer about ourselves down here below and about the forms of consciousness above.