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“Elohim” is a Hebrew word that is commonly used in the Bible to refer to God. It is a plural form of the word “Eloah,” which means “god” or “deity.” Despite its plural form, “Elohim” is often used with singular verbs and adjectives when referring to the God of Israel, indicating a singular divine being. The term emphasizes God’s majesty, power, and sovereignty. In the context of the Hebrew Bible, “Elohim” is used in various passages to denote God’s role as the creator and ruler of the universe.” (GBT 4.o)
“In some Gnostic and mystical traditions, the term “Elohim” can be associated with a variety of divine beings or emanations, including aeons. Aeons are often considered to be divine entities or aspects of the divine that represent different attributes or aspects of God in Gnostic cosmology. In this context, “Elohim” may be used to refer to a group of these divine beings rather than the singular God of traditional Judaism and Christianity.
However, in the traditional Hebrew Bible context, “Elohim” primarily refers to the singular God of Israel and does not typically encompass the concept of aeons. The interpretation of “Elohim” can vary significantly depending on the theological framework and tradition being considered.” (GPT 4.o)
This is the story of “mud up, spirit down.” I’ve mentioned before that my gnosis began to blossom about 20 years ago whenever I’d be walking in the woods or standing by the river with the dogs. The phrase mud up, spirit down would come to mind. That’s it. I pondered the phrase mud up, spirit down for a few years, but I didn’t worry about it. I usually trust my subconscious to work out big ideas for me while I am busy with other things. I used to think that the subconscious was just ordinary consciousness that we aren’t paying particular attention to. It’s usually depicted as an iceberg, with our aware consciousness peeking out of the ocean at the top with the majority of the subconscious iceberg below the surface of the water. Now I think it’s a bit more complicated than that. Now I would say that there are different types of subconscious thought that represent the unconscious aspect of the three different aspects of our being.
The three aspects of our being, also known as the tripartite nature of humanity, are these: We have the big S Self, which is the spiritual aspect that is always in communion with the Father; then we have our ordinary consciousness that is called the psychical or psychological part; and finally we have the thoughts that arise from the material, physical aspects of our body. These three levels of our nature are able to function independently of each other, and one or the other is in conscious control at any given time.
For example, when I’m walking in the woods my physical awareness may be on my feet and immediate surroundings so I can navigate the trail without tripping over things, but my subconscious physical aspect is probably thinking about food or avoiding getting bitten by bugs or scratched by brambles or things of that nature. At the same time, my psychological self may be replaying a recent conversation in my head, or singing a song, or even remembering some incident that provoked an emotional response earlier in the day. And of course the subconscious psychological self has a whole list of things I’m not aware of that it runs through—triggers from family or friends or the media, or constellations of similar incidents from the past that resonate with whatever I’m consciously thinking about, or subconscious emotional reactions to what is going on around me at the moment, and so on. This is the “mind chatter” that continually runs through most people’s heads. And then there is the spiritual Self, which is always in subconscious communion with the Father and the Fullness. At the conscious level, this is the voice that gives good advice and offers commentary on the things being thought about by the material and psychological levels—virtuous suggestions for feeling better or being more loving or helpful. It is the voice of the Holy Spirit that reminds us of scriptural quotes and suggests uplifting hymns to sing.
So you see, the unconscious is not simply a single, monolithic unconscious—it has different origins and responds to different prompts. When I am walking in the woods, I am able to hear my spiritual Self loud and clear. Much of the gnosis I share with you here at Gnostic Insights has come from walks in the woods. The other time my spiritual Self speaks loudly is when I am writing articles such as this one. These gnostic insights are not coming from my material or psychical aspects, but from the Holy Spirit flowing through my spiritual Self. I notice that my spiritual Self’s voice is a different and more reasonable voice than my ordinary consciousness and qualitatively different than my egoic, psychical talking voice.
In Gnosticism we say we come into this world with all of this spiritual knowledge inside of us because we’re fractals of the Father. We are born with the Fullness of God in every one of our cells. From the egg on up, we are full and complete fractals of the Father, which religious people misunderstand us as claiming to say, “I am God,” as if that’s a big heresy. Well, it is not truly heresy because we are not saying that we are God; it says so in Psalm 82:6 and again by Jesus in the New Testament when he makes reference to Psalm 82:6.
Let’s look at Psalm 82. It’s very relevant to these times we are living in because it speaks of a wicked ruling class that mistreats the common people. Pay particular note to the word elohim. The Hebrew word elohim is plural, and is usually translated as either multiple gods or as a single God with a capital G. It is noteworthy that the word elohim can also be translated as Aeons—which we Gnostics know to be the self-aware Totalities of the Fullness of God and co-existent with the Son of God.
Here is how Psalm 82 reads out of the Complete Jewish Bible translation:
82 A psalm of Asaf:
(1) Elohim [God] stands in the divine assembly;
there with the elohim [judges], he judges:
2 “How long will you go on judging unfairly,
favoring the wicked? (Selah)
3 Give justice to the weak and fatherless!
Uphold the rights of the wretched and poor!
4 Rescue the destitute and needy;
deliver them from the power of the wicked!”5 They don’t know, they don’t understand,
they wander about in darkness;
meanwhile, all the foundations of the earth
are being undermined.6 “My decree is: ‘You are elohim [gods, judges],
sons of the Most High all of you.
7 Nevertheless, you will die like mortals;
like any prince, you will fall.’”8 Rise up, Elohim, and judge the earth;
for all the nations are yours.
Psalm 82 speaks a powerful Gnostic truth. Written by a prophet who was also a poet and musician called Asaph during the time of King David and Solomon, this psalm appears to be written about the Son of the God Above All Gods. Our gnosis tells us that this psalm is not written about the Demiurge because it places Elohim (God) above, among the elohim (the Aeons of the Fullness). In Gnostic cosmology we know this God that stands amid the Aeons is the Son, because the Father is otherwise unapproachable whereas the Son is co-existent with the Aeons of the Fullness. The divine assembly clearly refers to the Hierarchy of the Fullness of God. Listen again:
“(1) Elohim [**The Son] stands in the divine assembly [**the Fullness of the Aeons]; there with the elohim [**Aeons], he judges.”
After decrying the unfairness of the powerful, wicked elites over the wretched and powerless, he reminds the elite that they, too, are elohim, and sons of the most high, yet they will fall and die like any other mortal. Verse 6 says,
6 “My decree is: ‘You are elohim [gods, judges**Aeons],
sons of the Most High all of you.”
Asaph then pleads with Elohim [**the Son] to rise up and judge the earth.
Moving on to the New Testament, John 10 speaks of an incident where Jesus, here called by his Hebrew name, Yeshua, healed a man who was blind from birth. Jesus healed him on the Sabbath, which the rabbis said was against the law regarding Sabbath. They accuse Yeshua of blasphemy when he claims that he is doing the work of his Father. The Judeans pick up rocks to stone him for “making himself out to be God.” Jesus then quotes Psalm 82 at them and points out that the Torah calls the people being addressed “elohim.” Here is the entire passage in context, using some Hebrew words rather than the English translation we are accustomed to:
Then came Hanukkah in Yerushalayim. It was winter, and Yeshua was walking around inside the Temple area, in Shlomo’s Colonnade. So the Judeans surrounded him and said to him, “How much longer are you going to keep us in suspense? If you are the Messiah, tell us publicly!” Yeshua answered them, “I have already told you, and you don’t trust me. The works I do in my Father’s name testify on my behalf, but the reason you don’t trust is that you are not included among my sheep. My sheep listen to my voice, I recognize them, they follow me, and I give them eternal life. They will absolutely never be destroyed, and no one will snatch them from my hands. My Father, who gave them to me, is greater than all; and no one can snatch them from the Father’s hands. I and the Father are one.” Once again the Judeans picked up rocks in order to stone him. Yeshua answered them, “You have seen me do many good deeds that reflect the Father’s power; for which one of these deeds are you stoning me?”
The Judeans replied, “We are not stoning you for any good deed, but for blasphemy — because you, who are only a man, are making yourself out to be God.” Yeshua answered them, “Isn’t it written in your Torah, ‘I have said, “You people are Elohim’ ”? If he called ‘elohim’ the people to whom the word of Elohim was addressed (and the Tanakh cannot be broken), then are you telling the one whom the Father set apart as holy and sent into the world, ‘You are committing blasphemy,’ just because I said, ‘I am a son of Elohim’? (Complete Jewish Bible, John 10:22-36)
In the verses above, Yeshua (the Hebrew version of the name Jesus), quotes from the Torah and the Tanakh to declare himself Elohim. (Tanakh is a Hebrew acronym that uses the first letter of the three parts of the Jewish Bible, or what Christians call the Old Testament. The Tanakh consists of the Torah (the Law or Writings, or Pentateuch—the 5 books of Moses), the Nevi’im (the Prophets), and the Ketuvim (the Writings-Poetry, Theology, and Drama).
Because Jesus said, “I and the Father are One,” the people picked up rocks to stone him for blasphemy. But Jesus reminded them that he was only quoting Psalm 82:6, and that all of the people who were referenced in the psalm were also elohim.
And this is an odd thing about Christians and the New Testament. There are many things that managed to slip by the Nicene Council when they were purging the gnosis from scripture. There’s plenty of gnosis still in the New Testament, but Christians kind of skip over that part. The Bible says we are the “sons of Elohim,” usually translated as “children of God.” In the modern vernacular I use in A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel, we are the fractals of the Spirit of God. We are the fruit of the elohim above, who are themselves the divisions of the Adonai Elohim (Lord of the Fullness and Son of the Father God Above All Gods). So when Jesus said we are elohim, sons of God, he was saying we, too, are the fractal elohim of God. Jesus was not the only son of God. We are all the sons of God, or the children of the Elohim.
Because we are the fruit of the Fullness, as was Jesus, we also have its characteristics inside of us but we forget it. In Gnosticism, we say this forgetfulness is brought about by the never-ending war. The never-ending war is not just wars on Earth or disagreements with our friends or our spouses or fights we have. It’s also the never-ending war against death and destruction, because we are melded to this material level, and that matter is controlled by an entity that Gnostics always talk about yet has been entirely cut out of Christianity. That entity is called the Demiurge. And he was actually the creator of the mud. So while the Demiurge is the creator God of the Old Testament, he’s not the ultimate Elohim. The god of the Old Testament is actually—and this is another huge, huge heresy—the ego of the Aeon that fell from heaven. The fallen god of this world is not Satan; it’s Jehovah.
The Demiurge contained all of the blueprints for creation. He knew it all. He knew everything because he was the ego of an Eloah–a fractal of the Son. And while the other Aeons, or elohim, were particular monads with singular functions, names, and places, the Aeon named Logos uniquely contained within himself a pleroma of fractals of all of the other Aeons of the Fullness. So when Logos fell, it was his fractal pleroma that broke open and formed the material out of which our cosmos was created.
Before the fall of Logos, all was in harmony in the Pleroma of the Hierarchy of the elohim. The Aeons had their self-awareness and identities, but they all were in perfect harmony and only worked according to the Simple Golden Rule. The Fall of Logos is the first act of ego apart from the body of the Fullness. Our Christian tradition retains a faint memory of the original Fall, but we errantly think that it was an Aeon called Lucifer, the Star of Light, who fell.
When Logos fell, his ego forgot about its origins, forgot about the Fullness and the Simple Golden Rule. It didn’t even remember that it was only the ego of an Aeon named Logos. It woke up and thought it was all alone, which it was, because there wasn’t anything other than the ethereal plane until Logos crashed and burned and deserted the newly formed cosmos in favor of returning to the Fullness. So when the ego was estranged from the Self, it believed it was the be all and end all and the egoic personality we call the Demiurge set about putting the fallen mess into order. This is our material universe. He’s the one that put the particles together in the atoms, and the atoms into the molecules, but he can’t get the life into it because he didn’t come down with the life or the love of the Fullness of Elohim.
The Aeons took pity upon the Demiurge. They wanted life to come into this dead universe and they wanted the ego of Logos to return home to its proper position and place above. They wanted to reclaim this lifeless universe that had been caused by the Fall. So they breathed life directly into the mud. (The Sethian myth presented in The Apocryphon of John features Sophia as the Aeon rather than Logos.) And that’s how life began. So the life is melded onto the mud, and we have a constant, never-ending war between our life and light and the mud and the Fall of darkness.
Logos is the only Aeon to have experienced the material world. The other Aeons remain ignorant of the material cosmos because they are established in the spiritual realm and their eyes remain upward toward the Father. The Tripartite Tractate says that the “remembrance” that the Second Order Powers carried with them as they incarnated down into this material cosmos included not only the love of the Father and the ability to cooperate with each other using the Simple Golden Rule of the Elohim, but it also included the intimate knowledge of matter that Logos learned during the brief time he spent down below in the Deficiency.
“To those who belong to the remembrance, however, he (Logos) revealed the thought of which he had stripped himself with the intention that is should draw them into a communion with the material.” (Tripartite Tractate, verse 98)
“Those who belong to the remembrance” refers to us Second Order Powers who dwell here below because we are of the “good thought.” The “thought of which he had stripped himself” is the egoic striving of Logos that brought about the Fall. We all carry the fallen ego of Logos forward through our material aspect. So that’s how that works. This is the story of “mud up, spirit down.”
We are the direct offspring of the Aeons of that eternal Fullness of God. The Fullness is not simply a description of God—it is a particular state of the Son of God—it is the elohim of Adonai Elohim. We, too, are elohim of Adonai Elohim. Jesus said so.
I made this nice little advertisement in a program called “canva.” It looks spectacular within the canva space, but when I export it the image loses resolution. <sigh>
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