The Gnostics taught that the world we live in is not the work of the highest God. In my research they come up in video retellings, in the Nag Hammadi texts and in the story of the Cathars.
The map
A Gnostic map of the cosmos gives the outline in one place. The One, or Monad, is the source. Around it lies the Pleroma, the fullness of the divine powers, and the aeons are eternal aspects of that source. Sophia’s mistake produces the craftsman who builds the lower world. The archons police that world, and an inner spark remains in people. Every other page here fills in one part of that picture.
Sophia
The fall begins with Sophia, Wisdom. Sophia in the Nag Hammadi Telling follows her in the Nag Hammadi version. On The Cosmic Story of Sophia and the Elohim I tell her story as one of the Elohim. That setting is a modern retelling, not something the Nag Hammadi texts say.
The craftsman and the rulers
The Gnostic craftsman is the demiurge, and several pages ask whether he is the god of the Old Testament. A Gnostic reading of Yahweh as demiurge lays out that identification. Graham Hancock on the Gnostic view of the biblical god and Eric Dubay’s Gnostic creation account give two modern voices on the same idea. Under the demiurge stand the rulers. On What Are Archons? I quote the Nag Hammadi tractate that makes their chief a blind and arrogant figure:
Their chief is blind; because of his power and his ignorance and his arrogance he said, with his power, “It is I who am God; there is none apart from me.” When he said this, he sinned against the entirety.
Reality of the Rulers (Layton), on What Are Archons?
The texts and the people
The primary texts are in The Nag Hammadi Library in English, the translation of the codices found in Egypt in 1945. The Gnostics were not only a library. What the Cathars Knew That Got 20,000 People Killed tells of the medieval movement that held the material world to be the work of a lesser god, and of the slaughter at Béziers in 1209. The video calls the Cathars a Gnostic-adjacent tradition, and that link is its argument.
Related pages
- A Gnostic map of the cosmos
- Sophia in the Nag Hammadi Telling
- A Gnostic reading of Yahweh as demiurge
- Graham Hancock on the Gnostic view of the biblical god
- Eric Dubay’s Gnostic creation account
- What Are Archons?
- The Nag Hammadi Library in English
- What the Cathars Knew That Got 20,000 People Killed
- The Cosmic Story of Sophia and the Elohim
For every page I tagged with Gnostic, see the Gnostic tag archive.
