Gnosticism

Book Review: VALIS by Philip K Dick

Known for his books that eventually would become big-screen hits like Blade Runner and Minority Report, the author Philip K Dick in VALIS (Vast Active Living Intelligence), combines elements of autobiography, philosophy, science-fiction, Gnostic theology, psychoanalysis, and existential self-construction. Like the recently published Exegesis, it takes its origin in the need to understand and respond to the events of February and March 1974 (which Dick called 2-3-74). He was irradiated by a brilliant pink light emanating from a Christian fish-symbol (ichthys) necklace worn by a young woman. He had a series of visions over the next two months and spent the rest of his life trying to understand them.

The novel splits Dick into two characters: the narrator, Philip K Dick, a moderately successful science-fiction writer; and his unattractively named “Horselover Fat” (Philip in Greek means “fond of horses”; “dick” is German for “fat”), which is his crazy, schizophrenic alter-ego, to whom the visions arrived, and whose life became a quest to resolve their enigma. The principal framework of this book is a sci-fi variant of Gnostic cosmology, where the phenomenal universe is a construct of a false, malevolent and insane god–explaining all of the irrationality and sufferings that it contains.

The world humanity finds itself exiled in, is called the Black Iron Prison, and we are its prisoners. The true God is outside the universe and breaking through to heal it and us in various ways, including the pink light that Dick experienced. After many surreal experiences and visions, the book ends with the narrator, Philip K. Dick, sitting before the TV, watching and waiting. He is clear that this is his way of continuing the search and keeping to his mission: keeping awake and open to infinite possibilities.

Dick’s novel opens with the beginnings of his eventual psychological break-down and suicide attempt:

Horselover Fat’s nervous breakdown began the day he got the phonecall from Gloria asking if he had any Nembutals. He asked her why she wanted them and she said that she intended to kill herself” (p. 1).

This is no message from a divine light, but the beginning of a soul-destroying relationship with a toxic, thanatotic individual, whose name “Gloria.” One of my favorite lines in the book, actually has little to do with Gnosticism. It goes like this:

I am, by profession, a science fiction writer. I deal in fantasies. My life is a fantasy. Nonetheless, Gloria Knudson lies in a box in Modesto, California. There’s a photo of her funeral wreaths in my photo album. It’s a color photo so you can see how lovely the wreaths are (p. 3).

I think many of us experience moments of revelatory intensity and also of intense despair at the imprisonment of our daily lives and of our very selves.

Caught in his own maze, like Daedalus, who built the labyrinth for King Minos of Crete and then fell into it and couldn’t get out. Presumably Daedalus is still there, and so are we. The only difference between us and Horselover Fat is that Fat knows his situation and we do not; therefore Fat is insane and we are normal (p. 31).

How did humanity get in such a situation? By the blinding, hypnotic power of the Demiurge, of course. However, other divine beings like Christ, had other plans:

It can be argued that this is the most important statement in the New Testament; certainly it is the most important not-generally-known statement. We shall be like him. That means that man is isomorphic with God. We shall see him as he really is. There will occur a theophany, at least to some. Fat could base the credentials for his whole encounter on this passage. He could claim that his encounter with God consisted of a fulfillment of the promise of 1 John 3:1/2-as Bible scholars indicate it, a sort of code which they can read off in an instant, as cryptic as it looks. Oddly, to a certain extent this passage dovetails with the Nag Hammadi typescript that Dr. Stone handed to Fat the day Fat got discharged from North Ward. Man and the true God are identical-as the Logos and the true God are-but a lunatic blind creator and his screwed-up world separate man from God. That the blind creator sincerely imagines that he is the true God only reveals the extent of his occlusion. This is Gnosticism. In Gnosticism, man belongs with God against the world and the creator of the world (both of which are crazy, whether they realize it or not). The answer to Fat’s question, “Is the universe irrational, and is it irrational because an irrational mind governs it?” receives this answer, via Dr. Stone:

“Yes it is, the universe is irrational; the mind governing it is irrational; but above them lies another God, the true God, and he is not irrational; in addition that true God has outwitted the powers of this world, ventured here to help us, and we know him as the Logos,” which, according to Fat, is living information (p. 58).

An enlightened, immortal man existed before the creator deity, and that enlightened, immortal man would appear within the human race which Samael was going to create. And that enlightened, immortal man who had existed before the creator deity would trample upon the fucked-up blind deluded creator like potter’s clay (p. 55).

This is further elaborated in the different points in Dick’s Tractates Cryptica Scriptura.

44. Since the universe is actually composed of information, then it can be said that information will save us. This is the saving gnosis which the Gnostics sought. There is no other road to salvation. However, this information-or more precisely the ability to read and understand this information, the universe as information-can only be made available to us by the Holy Spirit. We cannot find it on our own. Thus it is said that we are saved by the grace of God and not by good works, that all salvation belongs to Christ, who, I say, is a physician.

45. In seeing Christ in a vision I correctly said to him, “We need medical attention.” In the vision there was an insane creator who destroyed what he created, without purpose; which is to say, irrationally. This is the deranged streak in the Mind; Christ is our only hope, since we cannot now call on Asklepios. Asklepios came before Christ and raised a man from the dead; for this act, Zeus had a Kyklopes slay him with a thunderbolt. Christ also was killed for what he had done: raising a man from the dead. Elijah brought a boy back to life and disappeared soon thereafter in a whirlwind. “The Empire never ended.”

46. The physician has come to us a number of times under a number of names. But we are not yet healed. The Empire identified him and ejected him. This time he will kill the Empire by phagocytosis.

Earlier in the book, Horselover Fat’s world steadily begins to unravel, much like the characters in the Dickian-inspired movie Dark City. In Dark City: The Reality Projector, Individuation and the Aion, the author remarks on one of the characters, Detective Walenski, who has gone insane trying to find the truth about his unreality in his spiral-like existence.

“Round and round and round she goes… where she stops nobody knows.” – Detective Bumstead. Detective Walenkski’s drawings are reflections of his efforts to try to figure out that which he cannot remember or understand. The streets and subway follow a spiraling pattern . John finds out that the “Green Line” is the only way to Shell Beach (green-Osiris), but he has no way to get on it.

Horselover Fat eventually has a similar epiphany: that the present world of 1974, in reality, is a holographic cover-up, projecting over the sprawling nightmare, boiling behind it. To his horror, humanity was still stuck in the far-flung ancient world of Rome, where Christian martyrs were thrown to the lions, and all the Caesars spread the light of the Empire all over the known world. And curiously, behind ancient Rome, was also another “big brother,” communist, technocratic New World Order-type of dystopia, explored in another novel called Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said:

…during the interval in which he had experienced the two-world superimposition, had seen not only California, U.S.A., of the year 1974 but also ancient Rome, he had discerned within the superimposition a Gestalt shared by both space-time continua, their common element: a Black Iron Prison. This is what the dream referred to as “the Empire.” He knew it because, upon seeing the Black Iron Prison, he had recognized it. Everyone dwelt in it without realizing it. The Black Iron Prison was their world. Who had built the prison-and why-he could not say. But he could discern one good thing: the prison lay under attack. An organization of Christians, not regular Christians such as those who attended church every Sunday and prayed, but secret early Christians wearing light gray-colored robes, had started an assault on the prison, and with success. The secret, early Christians were filled with joy.

Fat, in his madness, understood the reason for their joy. This time the early, secret, gray-robed Christians would get the prison, rather than the other way around. The deeds of the heroes, in the sacred dream-time . . . the only time, according to the bushmen, that was real. Once, in a cheap science fiction novel, Fat had come across a perfect description of the Black Iron Prison but set in the far future. So if you superimposed the past (ancient Rome) over the present (California in the twentieth century) and superimposed the far future world of The Android Cried Me a River over that, you got the Empire, the Black Iron Prison, as the supra- or trans-temporal constant. Everyone who had ever lived was literally surrounded by the iron walls of the prison; they were all inside it and none of them knew it-except for the gray-robed secret Christians.

That made the early, secret Christians supra- or trans-temporal, too, which is to say present at all times, a situation which Fat could not fathom. How could they be early but in the present and the future? And if they existed in the present, why couldn’t anyone see them. On the other hand, why couldn’t anyone see the walls of the Black Iron Prison which enclosed everyone, including himself, on all sides? Why did these antithetical forces emerge into palpability only when the past, present and future somehow-for whatever reason-got superimposed?

Maybe in the bushmen’s dream-time no time existed. But if no time existed, how could the early, secret Christians be scampering away in glee from the Black Iron Prison which they had just succeeded in blowing up? And how could they blow it up back in Rome circa 70 C.E., since no explosives existed in those days? And now [sic], if no time passed in the dream-time, could the prison come to an end? It reminded Fat of the peculiar statement in Parsifal: “You see, my son, here time turns into space.”

In one article, Kyle Arnold sums up the following points succinctly:

In the following months, the visions continued. Scenes of ancient Rome appeared, superimposed over Dick’s suburban neighborhood. A local playground seemed a Roman prison. Where there was a chain-link fence, Dick saw iron bars, and where there were children playing, he saw weeping Christian martyrs about to be fed to lions. Dick saw pedestrians dressed in Roman military uniforms, stone walls, and iron bars. “I hadn’t gone back in time,” Dick wrote to a friend, “but in a sense Rome had come forward, by insidious and sly degrees, under new names, hidden by the flak talk and phony obscurations, at last into our world again.” Dick supposed time had stopped in 70 A.D., the year the temple of Jerusalem was destroyed by a Roman siege. Everything that happened afterwards was an illusion, and the world was still under Rome’s dominion. Dick believed the Roman Empire was embodied in the tyrannical Nixon administration, and responsible for the assassinations of the Kennedys and Martin Luther King Jr. His own role was that of an undercover Christian revolutionary fighting to overthrow the Empire. That was why the delivery girl had flashed him the fish sign.

The novel ends with an optimistic phone-call from Horselover Fat reporting on his quest to find the 5th Messiah:

“one day I got a phonecall from Horselover Fat: a phonecall from Tokyo. He sounded healthy and excited and full of energy, and amused at my surprise to be hearing from him” (p. 210).

The split between Dick and Fat continues, but it enriches his life instead of despairing it. The healing power of ICHTHYS, an anagram for “Iesous CHristos, THeou Yios, Soter” (Jesus Christ, Son of God, Savior) and Eros has come to win out over thanatos (spiritual death or ignorance) and alienation. After all the speculations and synchronicities, after all the encounters both toxic and salvific, there is no final explanation only a new sense of optimism and openness:

“My search kept me at home; I sat before the TV set in my living room. I sat; I waited; I watched; I kept myself awake. As we had been told, originally, long ago, to do; I kept my commission” (p. 212).

At the same time, Dick tells us in, “The Ten Major Principles of the Gnostic Revelation”: “To know these ten principles of Gnostic Christianity is to court disaster.” PKD is telling us right there that the archons will come after you once you figure out what’s really going on, much like the Strangers in Dark City and the agents in the Matrix trilogy.

Guest Post: Understanding the Truth of the Crucifixion by “Colorbas”

Hey, folks. Here is the first guest post of 2017. This is by a friend of mine but who wants to remain anonymous through the pen-name “Colorbas”. This one is about the concept of the “abortion” in reference to Demiurge being a malformed aborted fetus which eventually grow up into a blundering “god of the void,” when he stole a portion of Sophia’s power. This connects to the Eucharist, the Gospel of John, and Epiphanius’ slanderous and lurid description of a Gnostic cannibalistic practice. Yeah. Read on to find out more!

Before learning what the truth of the crucifixion actually is, one must first understand the same theology that the Ancients understood. It is a prerequisite because today we live in a 2000 year old smoke screen theology of the Catholic and Orthodox Churches which has only served to provide a false foundation which corrupted a proper understanding of the true meaning of the crucifixion.

So for the first part we shall learn the story of Sophia (Wisdom), her fall, her birth of a male child first called “Yaldabaoth,” then also called “Samael.” But this child was the one who was the architect of this world. His servants call him Jehovah or Yahweh. But what one must learn is what Sophia and her child must do to have Sophia’s error corrected. So let us begin with this: Who was Sophia? Sophia (“Wisdom”) was the youngest of the emanated divinities (or “Aeons”). Here is an explanation of the Aeons derived from the Panarion of Epiphanius of Salamis – Section 31:

These are the 30 Aeons … which have been kept secret and are not known. This is their invisible, spiritual Pleroma, with its triple division into “Ogdoad”, “Decad” and “Dodecad”. … “First-Progenitor” is known only to “Only-Begotten”, that is to “Mind”, who originated from him. To all the rest he is invisible and incomprehensible. Only “Mind” … enjoyed the contemplation of the Father and rejoiced in the perception of his immeasurable greatness. And he intended to communicate the greatness of the Father to the remaining Aeons, what he was like and how great he was, and how he was without beginning, uncontainable and impossible to see. But by the Father’s will Silence restrained him, because she meant to arouse them all to an intent and yearning to seek after their “First-Progenitor”.

Similarly the other Aeons also had a sort of silent yearning to see the originator of their seed, and be informed of their root which had no beginning. Sophia, the youngest of the Aeons (emanated divinities), was the one who was responsible for the “Fall”. Sophia (“Wisdom”) attempted to know the “First-Progenitor;” although this was impossible for the Aeons who had come after the first “Ogdoad.” (Male-female pairs are called “Syzygies.” Two such Syzygies are called a “Tetrad.” Two such Tetrads are called an “Ogdoad.”)

How did Sophia Fall?

“And … Sophia (Wisdom) … being an Aeon, conceived a thought from herself with the reflection of the Invisible Spirit and Foreknowledge. She wanted to bring forth a likeness out of herself without the consent of the [Invisible] Spirit … and without her consort… And because of the invincible power which is in her, her thought did not remain idle and a thing came out of her which was imperfect and different from her appearance, because she had created it without her consort… And when she saw the consequence of her desire, it had changed into a form of a lion-faced serpent. And its eyes were like lightning fires… She cast it away from her, outside that place [the Pleroma], that no one of the immortal ones [the other Aeons] might see it, for she had created it in ignorance… And she called his name Yaldabaoth…” [Apocryphon of John, from the Nag Hammadi Library]

Yaldabaoth is the negative and/or inferior world-architect (“Demiurge”). The Cosmos is the result of a celestial error. The only perfect existence is the Pleroma. The Cosmos is not the result of a deliberate act of a supreme God (as is taught by most modern versions of Christianity) but rather the result of an error made by the lowest of the emanated divinities. Sophia’s passion generates an “abortion,” a “formless entity,” which she cast outside the Pleroma. As a result of this error, the Father emanates a new Aeon-pair (a new “syzygy”), Christ and Holy Spirit, to take care of the “formless entity” which had resulted from Sophia’s passion. And a new, unpaired Aeon, Jesus, is emanated, who is the “perfect fruit of the Pleroma”, and expresses in his being the full attributes of all the Aeons.

As it says in Colossians, “For in him dwells all the fullness of the Godhead bodily”. The Christ Aeon re-shaped the “formless entity,” which then became the Demiurge. And Sophia becomes known as “Achamoth,” a lower Sophia. She becomes the spiritual essence hidden in the soul; and even unknown to her child the Demiurge. The “Fall” actually Preceded “Creation.” The Demiurge, upon,

“opening his eyes, he saw a vast quantity of matter without limit; and he became arrogant, saying, “It is I who am God, and there is none other apart from me”. When he said this, he sinned against the entirety. And a voice came forth from above the realm of absolute power, saying, “You are mistaken, Samael” – which is, ‘god of the blind’. [The Hypostasis of the Archons]

***

“And our sister Sophia is she who came down in innocence in order to rectify her deficiency. Therefore she was called Life, which is the mother of the living, by the Foreknowledge of the sovereignty of heaven. And through her they have tasted the Perfect Knowledge.” [The Secret Book of John]

Warning: The following last part is VERY GROTESQUE!

But it is necessary in order to come to a proper understanding of the crucifixion! How the Error of Sophia is Corrected Holy Communion, the bread and wine, from the earliest of times has always been understood to literally be the body and blood of Christ. Early Christians believed that the body of Christ was the dead body of that “formless entity” which emanated from Sophia. It was the “Abortion” which Sophia cast outside the Pleroma! If you are of the Spiritual you have true life within you. You must return that “formless entity” back to Sophia by eating it. Eating the body of Christ means to eat Sophia’s abortion! And this, the early Gnostic Christians called the “Perfect Passover.”

« But even though one of them should accidentally implant the seed of his natural emission prematurely and the woman becomes pregnant, listen to a more dreadfulthing that such people venture to do. They extract the fetus at the stage which is appropriate for their enterprise, take this aborted infant, and cut it up in a trough with a pestle. And they mix honey, pepper, and certain other perfumes and spices with it to keep from getting sick, and then all the revellers in this [herd] of swine and dogs assemble, and each eats a piece of the child with his fingers. And now, after this cannibalism, they pray to God and say, “We were not mocked by the archon of lust, but have gathered the brother’s blunder up!” And this, if you please, is their idea of the “Perfect Passover.” » (Panarion 26.5,4-6)

Gnostic Christians understood that having children is an error because all flesh in this world is the flesh of the archon who created the world and it really is a taking part in the Heavenly error made by Sophia when she gave birth to the abortion. The error is corrected by Sophia taking the archon/abortion back into herself. We take part in this correction by eating the aborted body and thus taking it back into ourselves. The Body of Christ is the dead body of this archon/abortion! This is the original understanding of Holy Communion and the Body of Christ on the Cross. Yes indeed! This theology is very grotesque! Christ gave the rite of Holy Communion to spare our minds from experiencing the consumption of human flesh and blood, which would only serve to set our minds on the flesh, rather than set our minds on the spirit. As it is recorded in the Gospel of John, “It is spirit who gives life; flesh profits nothing; the words that I have spoken to you are spirit and are life” (John 6:63).

“Then the Jews began to argue with one another, saying, “How can this man give us his flesh to eat?” So Jesus said to them, “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink His blood, you have no life in yourselves. He who eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up on the last day. For my flesh is true food, and my blood is true drink. He who eats my flesh and drinks my blood abides in me, and I in him. As the living Father sent me, and I live because of the Father, so he who eats me, he also will live because of me” (John 6:52-57).

***

« “The Lord hath shown me what my soul must say on its ascent to heaven, and how it must answer each of the powers on high. ‘I have recognized myself,’ it saith, ‘and gathered myself from every quarter, and have sown no children for the archon. But I have pulled up his roots, and gathered my scattered members, and I know who thou art. For I,’ it saith, ‘am of the ones on high.’ “ » [From the Gospel of Philip – not the one in the Nag Hammadi Library, but rather the real one!] (Panarion of Epiphanius 26.13,2-3)

This quote is from the real Gospel of Philip, I say, because it is quoted by Epiphanius as such. And, the Gospel of Philip in the Nag Hammadi Library not only does not have this verse, but – in reading it – there is a lot of Catholic-like verses contained in it. The verse here quoted relates to the early Gnostic Christian understanding of how to correct the error of having children, i.e. “sowing children for the archon” (the archon is Jehovah). – The correction is by “gathering your scattered members.”

Epiphanius comments:

“But if it turns out to have fathered a son, it is detained below until it can take its own children up and restore them to itself.”

Conclusion

Now it becomes clear why they Apostle Paul referred to the “Cross” with the words the “offense of the Cross” (Galatians 5:11)! “As a result of this many of his disciples withdrew and were not walking with him anymore” (John 6:66). After Jesus left the Christ on the Cross, and the Christ said to Jesus, “My God my God why have you forsaken me,” the Second Man sacrificed his body on behalf of all bodies of flesh, so that by eating we spiritually we take part in the Perfect Redemption! “And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself” (John 12:32). “Now those who belong to Christ have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires” (Galatians 5:24).

Henotheology!

Welcome to 2017! In previous posts, especially this one, I’ve noted that the Old Testament and even the New Testament are rife filled with references to other gods, or a plurality of gods (which are actually angels or archons, according to the Christian and Gnostic traditions). This is especially evident in the Apocrypha like the Books of Enoch, Jubilees, the Dead Sea Scrolls, and the Nag Hammadi Library. According to the dogma of the Nicene Creed of Orthodoxy and Catholicism, Moses taught monotheism on Mount Sinai from Yahweh. But careful research will lead to the opposite. He didn’t. They tell us that the Judeo-Christian tradition has always believed in only one God since the beginning. It didn’t. In fact, monotheism wasn’t even part of church doctrine until well into the Middle Ages. It didn’t even exist in the minds of the ancient Hebrews or Egyptians until the late 600’s BCE, long after Moses and the early Prophets. As we saw, the Bible is one of many places that the tradition of “many gods” can be found.

In the Dead Sea Scrolls for instance, the War Scroll 1:10 tells us:

On the day when the Kittim fall, there shall be battle and terrible carnage before the God of Israel, for that shall be the day appointed from ancient times for the battle of destruction of the sons of darkness. At that time, the assembly of gods and the hosts of men shall battle, causing great carnage; on the day of calamity, the sons of light shall battle with the company of darkness amid the shouts of a mighty multitude and the clamour of gods and men to (make manifest) the might of God. And it shall be a time of [great] tribulation for the people which God shall redeem; of all its afflictions none shall be as this, from its sudden beginning until its end in eternal redemption.

In the Nag Hammadi Codices, a rather curious and long, late Valentinian text, called the Tripartite Tractate, the author goes on a long-winded diatribe about how some Jews were not monotheists:

By interpreting them, they established many heresies which exist to the present among the Jews. Some say that God is one, who made a proclamation in the ancient scriptures. Others say that he is many. Some say that God is simple and was a single mind in nature. Others say that his activity is linked with the establishment of good and evil. Still others say that he is the creator of that which has come into being. Still others say that it was by the angels that he created.

Back in the Dead Sea Scrolls, specifically in the War Scroll (IQM, 1Q33, 4Q491-7, 4Q471), it mentions a church of gods, and that Michael reigns over a kingdom of gods. They also specify that these are living gods, indicating their real existence outside the imagination.

Be strong and fear not; [for they tend] towards chaos and confusion, and they lean on that which is not and [shall not be. To the God] of Israel belongs all that is and shall be; [He knows] all the happenings of eternity. This is the day appointed by Him for the defeat and overthrow of the Prince of the kingdom of wickedness, and He will send eternal succour to the company of His redeemed by the might of the princely Angel of the kingdom of Michael. With everlasting light He will enlighten with joy [the children] of Israel; peace and blessing shall be with the company of God. He will raise up the kingdom of Michael in the midst of the gods, and the realm of Israel in the midst of all flesh. Righteousness shall rejoice on high, and all the children of His truth shall jubilate in eternal knowledge. And you, the sons of His Covenant, be strong in the ordeal of God! His mysteries shall uphold you until He moves His hand for His trials to come to an end.

The Dead Sea Scrolls were written by the Essenes, who, as many other authors have stated, were in many ways similar to Jesus, and were the only major denomination of Judaism that Jesus did not criticize. One must ask: if Jesus were so adamantly opposed to the Pharisees and the Sadducees, who believed in only one God, yet was tolerant toward the Essenes, who believed in many gods, then does it not stand to reason that Jesus Christ himself may have also believed in many gods? In fact, Jesus Christ did believe in many gods. This is implicitly stated within his commentary on Psalm 82 in the Gospel of John! The Jews were criticizing him for calling himself the Son of God, because they thought it was blasphemy. In response, Jesus pointed out that Psalm 82 in the Bible says that there are many gods, and so therefore it is not blasphemy for Jesus to assert that he is one of these gods, as he put it (John 10:33-38):

The Jews answered Him, “We are not stoning you for any good work,” they replied, “but for blasphemy, because you, a mere man, claim to be God.” Jesus answered them, “Is it not written in your Law, ‘I have said you are “gods’”? If he called them ‘gods,’ to whom the word of God came–and Scripture cannot be set aside–what about the one whom the Father set apart as his very own and sent into the world? Why then do you accuse me of blasphemy because I said, ‘I am God’s Son’? Do not believe me unless I do the works of my Father. But if I do them, even though you do not believe me, believe the works, that you may know and understand that the Father is in me, and I in the Father.”

By saying this, Jesus affirmed the real existence of more than one God and affirmed his own divinity at the same time. Michael S. Heiser writes in The Unique Son of the Most High: The place of Jesus in the divine council, Part 1 of 4 John 10:22-42 (Jesus quotes Psalm 82:6):

6 I (the speaker is God) have said, “You are gods (Myhl); )eloh|4m); and all of you are children of the most High (!Ayæl.[, ynEßb.; be ne, (elyo4n). 7 But you shall die like men, and fall like one of the princes.

To whom is he speaking? The Jews at Sinai? No – the other elohim of the council in verse 1 of Psalm 82 are the audience. When Jesus quotes Psalm 82:6, he is mouthing the words of Yahweh (the original speaker in 82:6) and quotes the passage as it originally reads – God speaks to the other elohim. Jesus is not using the verse to say that Psalm 82 had God speaking to the Jews at Sinai.

Verse 7, the next verse, confirms this interpretation, since it says that these gods to whom God was speaking would “die like men” – if they were already men, this makes no sense. Who are the princes? See Daniel 10 – divine beings (the same Hebrew word for Michael and Gabriel beings “princes” is used here in Psalm 82:7 – r#o – sar).

POINT: Jesus does not view the plural elohim of Psalm 82:1 as mere humans, and there’s a reason this is so. The reason he quotes this verse is NOT to claim he’s just a man who can call himself a god like other men – it’s to claim deity as a son of the Most High, and to DISTINGUISH himself from the other sons. The former is the direct impact of John 10; the latter requires taking John 10 in the context of Jesus and John’s prior descriptions of Jesus in this same gospel as the “monogenes” – the UNIQUE son.

There are many other references to “many gods” in the Nag Hammadi as well. In the text On the Origin of the World, 2:97, it tells us:

Seeing that everybody, gods of the world and mankind, says that nothing existed prior to chaos, I, in distinction to them, shall demonstrate that they are all mistaken, because they are not acquainted with the origin of chaos, nor with its root.

And it is these gods that are actually subservient to what the text calls “Yaldabaoth,” the child of chaos or the Satanic demiurge and material principle.

And when Pistis Sophia desired to cause the thing that had no spirit to be formed into a likeness and to rule over matter and over all her forces, there appeared for the first time a ruler, out of the waters, lion-like in appearance, androgynous, having great authority within him, and ignorant of whence he had come into being. Now when Pistis Sophia saw him moving about in the depth of the waters, she said to him, “Child, pass through to here,” whose equivalent is ‘yalda baoth‘.

Since that day, there appeared the principle of verbal expression, which reached the gods and the angels and mankind. And what came into being as a result of verbal expression, the gods and the angels and mankind finished.

In the Books of Jeu, the Untitled Text, of the Bruce Codex, it tells us about a Heavenly, Pleromic City in which all manner of divinities dwell:

And in the place of the indivisible one there are twelve springs, and upon them twelve fatherhoods, surrounding the indivisible one in the manner of the deeps or these veils. And there is a crown upon the indivisible one in which is every species of life : and every triple-powered species; and every incomprehensible species : and every endless species ; and every unutterable species; and every silent species ; and every unmoved species ; and every first-visible species ; and every self-begotten species ; and every true species ; all being within it.

And in this is every species and every gnosis. And every power receives light from it.And every mind is revealed in it. This is the crown which the Father of the All gave to the indivisible one, in which there are 365 species, and they shine and fill the All with imperishable and inextinguishable light.

In the Gospel of Thomas, Logion 30, Jesus seems to indicate the reality of the divine mystery of the Trinity. But as in due course, we will see this mystery is anything but.

Jesus said, “Where there are three gods, they are gods. Where there are two or one, I am with him.”

In the Gnostic text Melchizedek, it differentiates between the gods, the archons and the archangels:

Death will tremble and be angry, not only he himself, but also his fellow world-ruling archons, and the principalities and the authorities, the female gods and the male gods, together with the archangels.

In the Hermetic-Stoic text Asclepius 21-29, it says that certain Gnostic human beings or Hermetic sages have expanded their spirits enough to be indeed enlightened dual beings–being of both spirit and matter and actually contain in themselves the ability to create gods through their theurgical rituals which tap into the realms of the imaginal, in which I will discuss later.

“And it happened this way because of the will of God that men be better than the gods, since, indeed, the gods are immortal, but men alone are both immortal and mortal. Therefore, man has become akin to the gods, and they know the affairs of each other with certainty. The gods know the things of men, and men know the things of the gods. And I am speaking about men, Asclepius, who have attained learning and knowledge. But (about) those who are more vain than these, it is not fitting that we say anything base, since we are divine and are introducing holy matters.

“Since we have entered the matter of the communion between the gods and men, know, Asclepius, that in which man can be strong! For just as the Father, the Lord of the universe, creates gods, in this very way man too, this mortal, earthly, living creature, the one who is not like God, also himself creates gods. Not only does he strengthen, but he is also strengthened. Not only is he god, but he also creates gods. Are you astonished, Asclepius? Are you yourself another disbeliever like the many?”

The Gospel of Philip tells us something very similar:

That is the way it is in the world – men make gods and worship their creation. It would be fitting for the gods to worship men!

Returning to the Hermetic text, Asclepius, it also states that “the gods are derived from pure matter.” Here, the gods are not spiritual entities, but material entities, and therefore may be biological in nature like humans are. Yet the same passage also asserts that the gods are immortal. Perhaps certain biological entities that are much more intelligent than mankind have figured out a way to cheat death indefinitely, and thus become “pure matter.”

For the gods, since they came into being out of a pure matter, do not need learning and knowledge. For the immortality of the gods is learning and knowledge, since they came into being out of pure matter. It (immortality) assumed for them the position of knowledge and learning. By necessity, he (God) set a boundary for man; he placed him in learning and knowledge.

The depths of hell are also filled with distinctly different entities, including at least four different types, according to the Trimorphic Protennoia:

I am the life of my Epinoia that dwells within every Power and every eternal movement, and (in) invisible Lights and within the Archons and Angels and Demons, and every soul dwelling in Tartaros, and (in) every material soul. I dwell in those who came to be. I move in everyone and I delve into them all. I walk uprightly, and those who sleep, I awaken. And I am the sight of those who dwell in sleep.

In the Platonizing Sethian text, Allogenes, it ruminates on whether or not the “Summum Bonum”, or the Highest Good actually has angels at his beckoning call:

We do not know whether the Unknowable One has angels or gods, or whether the One who is at rest was containing anything within himself except the stillness, which is he, lest he be diminished.

In Genesis 3:5, the Serpent tempted Eve saying:

For God does know that in the day you eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and you shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.

In other words, the fruit from the tree of knowledge would give Eve the perspective and “knowledge” of the Elohim. The Hebrew word elohim can mean either “God” singular or “gods” plural, depending on the verb. The Hypostasis of the Archons clarifies the matter, explicitly saying that Eve would become like the gods but the “chief ruler” or Yaldabaoth/Yahweh, out of jealousy, damned the primal couple, when they were expelled from the Garden of Eden.

And the snake, the instructor, said, “With death you shall not die; for it was out of jealousy that he said this to you. Rather your eyes shall open and you shall come to be like gods, recognizing evil and good.” And the female instructing principle was taken away from the snake, and she left it behind, merely a thing of the earth.

Moreover, the book of Jubilees (3:19) found among the Dead Sea Scrolls also confirms that “gods” plural is the original meaning.

And the serpent said unto the woman, ‘Ye shall not surely die: for God doth know that on the day ye shall eat thereof, your eyes will be opened, and ye will be as gods, and ye will know good and evil.

Moreover, it seems like the God of Genesis doesn’t really know everything when he asks:

And the LORD God called unto Adam, and said unto him, Where art thou?

The Testimony of Truth has this to say about the Genesis account:

But what sort is this God? First he maliciously refused Adam from eating of the tree of knowledge, and, secondly, he said “Adam, where are you?” God does not have foreknowledge? Would he not know from the beginning? And afterwards, he said, “Let us cast him out of this place, lest he eat of the tree of life and live forever.” Surely, he has shown himself to be a malicious grudger! And what kind of God is this? For great is the blindness of those who read, and they did not know him. And he said, “I am the jealous God; I will bring the sins of the fathers upon the children until three (and) four generations.” And he said, “I will make their heart thick, and I will cause their mind to become blind, that they might not know nor comprehend the things that are said.” But these things he has said to those who believe in him and serve him!

The Genesis account presents us with one single all-powerful Creator God and yet has a few references to the Elohim in regard to both the Trees of Knowledge and Life. Does Jesus say anything in reference to Genesis? Actually, Jesus never does affirm that the earth was literally created in six days nor does he affirm the literal creationist timeline as creationists might have you believe. There is only one reference out of the entire New Testament that discusses the creation account in the 7 day period including the day of rest in Hebrews 4:3-7, a text, by the way, which had a hard time entering into the traditional canon, much like Revelation.

³Now we who have believed enter that rest, just as God has said,

“So I declared on oath in my anger,

‘They shall never enter my rest.’”

And yet his works have been finished since the creation of the world.⁴For somewhere he has spoken about the seventh day in these words: “On the seventh day God rested from all his works.”⁵And again in the passage above he says, “They shall never enter my rest.”

⁶Therefore since it still remains for some to enter that rest, and since those who formerly had the good news proclaimed to them did not go in because of their disobedience, ⁷God again set a certain day, calling it “Today.”

Moreover, the opening verse of John’s gospel, “In the beginning was the Word,” presents a creation account that appears to be aimed at competing against Genesis 1. The Greek word Logos implies logic, order, and reason, which is the exact opposite of what Genesis 1 says about the earth being “without form and void.” This indicates that the Logos was sort of a demiurgical force that gave some sort of semblance of order from the chaotic abyss, from which Yaldaboath, the god of the void, also emerges from.

Henotheism, not monotheism, is the theology of Moses and the Prophets. It is the chief theology of Jesus Christ himself as well. This fact is generally accepted by scholars, as any number of authorities can attest. So, what exactly is Henotheism? Nothing better defines Henotheism than what St. Paul the Apostle told in 1 Corinthians 4-8:

⁴So then, about eating food sacrificed to idols: We know that “An idol is nothing at all in the world” and that “There is no God but one.” ⁵For even if there are so-called gods, whether in heaven or on earth (as indeed there are many “gods” and many “lords”), ⁶yet for us there is but one God, the Father, from whom all things came and for whom we live; and there is but one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom all things came and through whom we live.

Henotheism is the belief that many gods exist, but that only one God should be worshiped. Unlike monotheism, there are truly many gods and they really do exist. Yet unlike polytheism, not all the gods are worshiped. Only one of them is worshiped, and the rest are profane and are to be shunned. Henotheism explains why James the brother of Jesus and Saint John the Apostle, together with all the Prophets, were so thoroughly against idols and eating meat sacrificed to idols, even to the point where it was one of the few regulations of the Old Testament that they insisted non-Jewish Christians must keep in full as stated in Acts 15:29.

You are to abstain from food sacrificed to idols, from blood, from the meat of strangled animals and from sexual immorality. You will do well to avoid these things. Farewell.

This is because sacrifices to idols serve profane entities that truly do exist, according to 1 Corinthians 10:19-22:

¹⁹What do I imply then? That food offered to idols is anything, or that an idol is anything? ²⁰No, I imply that what pagans sacrifice they offer to demons and not to God. I do not want you to be participants with demons. ²¹You cannot drink the cup of the Lord and the cup of demons. You cannot partake of the table of the Lord and the table of demons.²²Shall we provoke the Lord to jealousy? Are we stronger than he?

Henotheism explains why idolatry is the most frequently mentioned offense in the entire Bible–for if God is all-powerful, then an idol is nothing, and it would only be an inconsequential joke and hardly worth the mention. But if idolatry truly serves other gods that truly do exist, and if sacrifices to idols truly feeds those gods, then this explains why Yahweh and his Prophets are so vociferously against idolatry. For if there are other gods, then these gods are truly a threat to Yahweh and to his Messiah, and therefore it is particularly important that idolatry does not infiltrate the ranks of the faithful, for it truly gives enemies a foot in the door by which they can infiltrate the armies of Yahweh. The God of Henotheism is actually competing against other gods who are real. Worshiping other gods is serving other gods, and serving other gods undermines the power of your covenant God, and this is tantamount to adultery against your God and treason against your nation. In such terms, the Prophets speak of idolatry. This line of thinking only makes sense in light of Henotheism.

If God were Almighty, then the overarching importance of the prohibition against idols makes no sense at all, because in a monotheistic system, and idol has no power. Which is worse, praying to rocks and dead trees, or committing murder? In a monotheistic system, the first is laughable but the second is quite heinous. But in a Henotheistic system, idolatry is even more heinous than murder, for murder can only kill the body, but idolatry kills both body and soul, for it puts the soul at the mercy of gods who care not for humanity. Only within the framework of Henotheistic thinking does it make sense that idolatry is a worse crime than murder, theft, sexual perversion, or any other infraction. Seeing that the Bible condemns idolatry more frequently than any other sin, this is a case for Henotheism. Idolatry is also considered the same as adultery by Jesus as well in Matthew 5:27-28.

²⁷“You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall not commit adultery.’²⁸But I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart.

In other words, if you are worshiping God but then praying to other pagan gods, then in reality, you are already committing adultery. In the Old Testament, we actually the first instance in which a foreign god actually humbles himself before Yahweh–that being is Dagon, the fish god in 1 Samuel 5:2-4:

²Then they carried the ark into Dagon’s temple and set it beside Dagon.³When the people of Ashdod rose early the next day, there was Dagon, fallen on his face on the ground before the ark of the Lord! They took Dagon and put him back in his place. ⁴But the following morning when they rose, there was Dagon, fallen on his face on the ground before the ark of the Lord! His head and hands had been broken off and were lying on the threshold; only his body remained.

In the text Ruth 1:15-17, we have Naomi who was a Hebrew who believed in Yahweh, but here she sanctioned the worship of other gods besides Yahweh, but only for those outside the Hebrew nation.

¹⁵“Look,” said Naomi, “your sister-in-law is going back to her people and her gods. Go back with her.”

¹⁶But Ruth replied, “Don’t urge me to leave you or to turn back from you. Where you go I will go, and where you stay I will stay. Your people will be my people and your God my God. ¹⁷Where you die I will die, and there I will be buried. May the Lord deal with me, be it ever so severely,if even death separates you and me.”

In Jeremiah 48:7, the Moabite god Chemosh is said to be bound in chains like an actual person, thanks to Yahweh’s invasion.

Since you trust in your deeds and riches, you too will be taken captive, and Chemosh will go into exile, together with his priests and officials.

As stated in earlier posts, we saw that many of the western Semitic peoples, including Hebrews, Canaanites, and the more archaic city of Ugarit, believed in a Father-God called El, which corresponds to the Greek Ouranos. The name El and its variants are known throughout the Bible, El, Elyon, El-Shaddai, and Eloah. They believed El spawned a brood of sons called bn-Ilm (Ugaritic) or beni-ha-Elohim (Hebrew), which means “sons of El” or “sons of the God,” and that these sons of El participated in some kind of divine government called “the congress of the gods.” Mark S. Smith in the book The Origins of Biblical Monotheism: Israel’s Polytheistic Background and the Ugaritic Texts, tells us that the Psalms 82 reference of the “divine council” scene, doesn’t actually portray Yahweh as the head of the assemblage.

One biblical text that presents Yahweh in an explicit divine council scene does not cast him as its head (who is left decidedly mute or undescribed, probably the reason why it survived the later collapsing of the different tiers). This text is Psalms 82, which begins in verse 1:

“God (elohim) stands in the divine assembly of El, among the divinities (elohim) He spronounces judgment.”

Here the figure of God, understood as Yahweh, takes his stand in the assembly. The name El was understood in the tradition – and perhaps at the time of the original text’s composition as well – to be none other but Yahweh, and not a separate God called El.

This is the origin of the title “Standing One” of Simon Magus. It indicates that a divine power has decided to stand up and forge his own divine kingdom and even wage war against the other gods. The operations of this congress are implicit within such Biblical stories as the Tower of Babel, where Yahweh consults with the other gods – “Let us go down and confuse their language” Genesis 11:7 – and in Job, where “the sons of God came to present themselves before Yahweh.” Job 1:6, 2:1. El and his wife Asherah had a total of 70 sons in the Biblical and Ugaritic traditions, or 77 in the Hittite tradition. These were the “sons of God,” and to each of them El gave a nation as an inheritance. Yahweh was one of these sons of El, and his inheritance was Israel, as stated in an earlier article. Consequently, each nation was supposed to worship one of the sons of El as its appointed God. Canaan worshiped Baal, Moab worshiped Chemosh, Ammon worshiped Molech, and Israel worshiped Yahweh. They all paid homage to El as the Father-God. This can be seen in Jubilees, where Shem,

“blessed the God of gods, who had put the word of the Lord into his mouth, and the Lord for evermore.” Jubilees 8:20-21.

In this passage, it sounds as if Shem was blessing two distinct divine entities – El and Yahweh, Father and Son. We already saw that in Deuteronomy 32:8, Dead Sea Scrolls and Septuagint tells us:

“When Elyon divided the nations, when He separated the sons of Adam, he set the boundaries of the nations according to the number of the sons of Elohim.”

What this passage means is this: The Father-God Elyon divided the nations according to the number of sons he had, and so each nation got its own god. Your Bible might say “sons of Israel” in place of “sons of Elohim,” but both the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Septuagint attest that the Bible originally said “sons of Elohim” not “sons of Israel,” as does Irenaeus also (Against Heresies 3.12.9). Many scholars believe that the Hebrew Bible was intentionally corrupted by the monotheists to read “sons of Israel” because later Judaism evolved to become monotheist.

Often, even in early times, the national god was combined with the Father-God El to form one entity, hence the term “Yahweh Elyon” (the LORD Most High) in Genesis 14, and “Yahweh Elohim” (the LORD God). Hence, the two deities were collapsed into one long before monotheism was invented. This also is the origin of Trinitarian thinking – that Jesus Christ, as an entity, can be collapsed into a single entity with the Father and the Spirit, thus making God three-in-one. Today, theologians often refer to the Trinity as a “mystery,” but there was no such “mystery” in the minds of ancient Christian Trinitarians. They took it for granted, because it was consistent with the same way they had thought for centuries. Only with the general acceptance of the monotheistic heresy did the Trinity become a seemingly self-contradictory “mystery.”

This brings us to the violent activities of the God of Israel. Psalm 82:6-8 tells us:

⁶“I said, ‘You are “gods”;

you are all sons of the Most High.’

⁷But you will die like mere mortals;

you will fall like every other ruler.”

⁸Rise up, O God, judge the earth,

for all the nations are your inheritance.

In other words, the God of Israel’s rightful destiny is to ultimately conquer the other gods and appropriate their inheritances. In a world filled with warfare and hostile nations, the logical thing to do is to have your nation and the god that rules over it, top dog. That is exactly how the ancient Israelite’s viewed such things. Yahweh should be president in the congress of the gods and should have the power to make war with the other gods and take away their power.

This is especially evident when we study the Psalms and the life story of King David. David’s covenant or pact with Yahweh was simple: you keep me from being killed by my enemies, and I will conquer all Israel’s neighbors for you. The covenant was a contractual obligation between two parties for their mutual benefit. The benefit to David was a long life. The benefit to Yahweh was the conquest of Edom, Moab, Philistia, Syria, Ammon, and the national unity of Israel. Once this is understood, David’s Psalms make sense. His frequent mention of the underworld and his intense fear of death–coupled with his description of Yahweh as a god of war with nostrils filled with fire, riding on thunderclouds, sword in hand, hurling lightning bolts, and shooting arrows at his enemies, along with multiple songs of victory–these features are consistent with David’s incessant wars of conquest against all Israel’s neighbors.

In this god-eat-god cosmic system, David wanted to ensure Yahweh was the top dog or the king of the jungle–hence the image of the lion and the serpent associated with the Jewish god. This sort of alliance system between gods and humans is what Old Testament covenant theology is all about. When Israel went to war, they carried the throne of Yahweh into battle, the Ark of the Covenant, because Yahweh was their commander and ally. Before they attacked, they consulted with Yahweh, to make certain he approved of the military action. Every war was a holy war against some other competing nation and its god. Expanding the boundaries of your nation meant expanding the empire of your covenant god, and your god would reward you for it.

Jesus himself acts like a warring Son of God with words like:

“Do not think that I came to bring peace to the earth. I did not come to bring peace, but a sword?” Luke 12:51, Matthew 10:34.

Jesus, is in essence, a holy warrior. Jesus says things like this because he knows he is in an all-encompassing cosmic battle with the chief principle of matter of this world–Satan–as well as his hordes of demons. Jesus Christ made friends with the poor and the wretched, the prostitutes, and social outcasts. He was not looking for ethical or self-righteous people. He was looking for loyal people, worthy to his cause. He was looking for people in the dregs of society or the worst of sinners who would fight for him–who would risk everything for him because they had nothing to lose anyway. Jesus is presented as not an all-powerful being but a god among gods, who must fight his way to become chief of the gods, or else he would become a slave to gods more powerful than himself–at least in this world anyway. He wants violent people, red hot for their faith and devotion to his cause rather than embrace a universalistic religious message as espoused by more pacifist saints. That is why Jesus says he will vomit out the lukewarm in Revelation 3:16.

Jesus continually talks about the wicked hearted hypocrites and calls them vipers and perverse. He also referred to gentiles as dogs. The Lord wasn’t some friendly hippie that the New Age makes him out to be. He’s too much of a truth teller so they killed him for it. Jesus continually told his disciples to count the cost of being loyal in his service. In Luke 14:25-33, he tells them to properly anticipate all the costs of being associated with the Son of God in terms of building towers and warfare strategies similar to those devised by Sun Tzu.

²⁵Large crowds were traveling with Jesus, and turning to them he said:²⁶“If anyone comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters—yes, even their own life—such a person cannot be my disciple. ²⁷And whoever does not carry their cross and follow me cannot be my disciple.

²⁸“Suppose one of you wants to build a tower. Won’t you first sit down and estimate the cost to see if you have enough money to complete it?²⁹For if you lay the foundation and are not able to finish it, everyone who sees it will ridicule you, ³⁰saying, ‘This person began to build and wasn’t able to finish.’

³¹“Or suppose a king is about to go to war against another king. Won’t he first sit down and consider whether he is able with ten thousand men to oppose the one coming against him with twenty thousand? ³²If he is not able, he will send a delegation while the other is still a long way off and will ask for terms of peace. ³³In the same way, those of you who do not give up everything you have cannot be my disciples.

However, very few make it past the veil and are indeed victorious over the world.

¹³“Enter through the narrow gate. For wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it. ¹⁴But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it.

If I’m right, and all these deities have competing interests and are recruiting followers on earth for unseen cloak-and-dagger conspiracies on the other side, Jesus could be some opposing force that steals their recruits and diminishes their ranks, which would explain why they hate him so dearly. Jesus, in essence, would be like the “get out of jail free” card of the spirit world. This also explains why the other gods also hate Yahweh, because he is in constant war and competition with them. So, were the Gnostics right in saying we are in a prison house or insane asylum ruled by multiple cosmocraters and demonic archons? And that Jesus chooses to baptize those who he wants to be his disciples? The Excerpts of Theodotus say something to this effect.

Now, regeneration is by water and spirit, as was all creation: “For the Spirit of God moved on the abyss.” And for this reason the Saviour was baptized, though not Himself needing to be so, in order that He might consecrate the whole water for those who were being regenerated. Thus it is not the body only, but the soul, that we cleanse. It is accordingly a sign of the sanctifying of our invisible part, and of the straining off from the new and spiritual creation of the unclean spirits that have got mixed up with the soul.

Some of the archons would undoubtedly be less evil than others. Some might not even be evil and may be, in fact, good, but their ultimate intentions may not be so pure. They could, perhaps, all desire power, worship, and honor, even the good ones, so even if you serve the good archons, you’re still a slave. Jesus is some formerly unknown alien infiltrator who showed up out of nowhere and began zapping people out of the sphere of the archons. Yahweh would be one of the archons, not the true father of Jesus Christ. Maybe he’s a good archon, but he still wants power, glory, and submission. This is the Gnostic belief. Sabaoth, the “Lord of Forces” would essentially be Yahweh as we think of him today. The malicious aspects of the OT deity could be Yaldabaoth or Satan. They would all be part of the Elohim or the original pantheon of divinities worshiped in ancient Mesopotamia.

The Marcionites believed that the ones who would be saved were those who were cursed by the demiurge and were unfairly treated in this world, i.e., sinners and outcasts, kind of like Cain, Korah, Balaam, and other so-called bad guys of the Old Testament. Because these sorts of people were so unfairly mistreated in the world, the Marcionites thought, they would be the only ones who would be opening to receiving the radical gospel about the alien God of Jesus Christ. They were the perfect soldiers for Jesus’ controversial and exclusive message of his divine sonship, the redemption of the believer and the coming judgment and destruction of the cosmos through the fiery conflagration.

This is perhaps where some mythicists go wrong. They are right in saying that Jesus shares many similarities with other pre-Christian gods and their dramatic stories. Jesus also shares similarities with other enigmatic and magical figures in the Bible like Simon Magus, etc. But to say that Jesus was simply invented in the twisted, archonic minds of the Roman rulers or invented by some unknown cabal is exactly what the controllers want you to believe. This is exactly what Gnostic texts like On the Origin of the World is refuting!

“Now the Word that is superior to all beings was sent for this purpose alone: that he might proclaim the unknown. He said, “There is nothing hidden that is not apparent, and what has not been recognized will be recognized.” And these were sent to make known what is hidden, and the seven authorities of chaos and their impiety. And thus they were condemned to death.

So when all the perfect appeared in the forms modelled by the rulers, and when they revealed the incomparable truth, they put to shame all the wisdom of the gods. And their fate was found to be a condemnation. And their force dried up. Their lordship was dissolved. Their forethought became emptiness, along with their glory.”

I definitely don’t think it’s mythology. I know it’s not mythology. These entities are real. Once you conjure to manifestation, you know of their reality forever. And of course, they know that you know of their reality forever. You get marked, essentially. Whether by Jesus Christ or some other demonic being. And we have to decide which team to side with since they are all fighting for our souls.

And as Christopher Knowles over at the Secret Sun once said in his series explaining why he is not a mythicist:

But believing Jesus or Paul were real people doesn’t mean you need to buy into the tenets of orthodox Christianity, or of any other kind of Christianity, for that matter.

And finally, the Neoplatonists taught the idea of a world-soul, or the Anima Mundi, in which they acquired from Plato. This is the divine, noetic realm from which emerged the gods and daimons. It is also the equivalent of Dr. Carl Jung’s collective unconscious and Dr. Henry Corbin’s Imaginal Realm. All gods, daimons, angels, heroes, fairies, devils, monsters, and myths originate from there as well. This is the very subject of focus in Daimonic Reality: A Field Guide to the Otherworld by Patrick Harper and John Keel’s The Eighth Tower. In fact, that is what the On the Origin of the World is telling us, explicitly:

Now the eternal realm (aeon) of truth has no shadow outside it, for the limitless light is everywhere within it. But its exterior is shadow, which has been called by the name ‘darkness’. From it, there appeared a force, presiding over the darkness. And the forces that came into being subsequent to them called the shadow ‘the limitless chaos’. From it, every kind of divinity sprouted up […] together with the entire place, so that also, shadow is posterior to the first product. It was <in> the abyss that it (shadow) appeared, deriving from the aforementioned Pistis.

The Soul of the World, collective unconscious, or Imaginal Realm, is the very source of which all the gods emerge from, like droplets from a wave. In other words the gods, daimons, and myths of the Imaginal Realm are not in the Imaginal Realm etc.–they are the Imaginal Real. It is this dynamis or power from which many Gnostics drew their strength from to create the gods through occult means similar to that of creating egregores as hinted at in the Hermetic text, Ascelpius. In fact, it is a dynamic, tempestuous place that constantly branches into “our” world–its tendrils leaping into the physical plane, the mental plane (our thoughts/imagination) and our psychological complexes and dreams.

The Anima Mundi, the daimonic reality in which our spirits also originate from, also exists within each of us–it is a plan of being that is as much “out there” as it is “within us,” as as opposed to how the “unconscious” part of the collective unconscious suggests as area of being that can be reduced to psychological factors. It is also connected to the idea of the “vault of heaven” as per Genesis or the demiurgical “womb” of the Cainites per the church father Epiphanius. And it is the means by which we can create physical reality and impress our will upon (e.g) the law of attraction–a subject and direction that will be explored further in depth, this year in 2017.

Hidden Knowledge in the Grail Temple

The Holy Grail story is familiar to many in the western world; to some it is an icon of literature and to others a source of comical amusement thanks to Monty Python and the Holy Grail. It is absolutely true that the Holy Grail represents the divine knowledge gained at the end of an inward spiritual journey—knowledge that is gradually lost through the cyclical ages that Hesiod, Vedic and even Hermetic traditions speak of.

Traditionally, it is a legend commencing in late 12th century, created by French and German poets like Wolfram von Eschenbach in Parzival. The Holy Grail takes various forms: a plate or bowl containing the bread of Holy Communion for the Fisher King. It is also portrayed as a stone cast down from heaven on which the abstaining angels stood for sanctuary when Lucifer rebelled against God as mentioned in texts like Isaiah and Ezekiel. The gem was given to Adam when he lived in the Garden of Eden after the rebellion of the angels. When he and Eve were cast out, the Grail was lost to him as well. Seth, Adam’s progeny, was said to have gained re-entry into Eden and to have recovered the sacred vessel. Significantly, Seth remained in paradise for 40 years. The number 40 is itself a mystical motif; Moses wandered for 40 years in the desert, with Noah on the ark 40 days and nights, for Jesus was tempted for 40 days.

It is also a cup in which Joseph of Arimathea collected Christ’s blood on the cross. More modern interpretations include Mary Magdalene as the receptacle of Jesus’ seed as the foundation for the “Merovingian bloodline,” as the authors of Holy Blood Holy Grail have theorized. The chalice is most popular today, doubling as the same cup used by Jesus in the Last Supper. Joseph of Arimathea is said to have brought the Grail to England, which then became an important part of the Arthurian myths.

The Holy Grail myth also links to ideas of gnosis in its relationship to humanity and the world, especially the world of nature and its elements. In the book Baphomet: The Mystery of the Temple Unveiled by Tracy Twyman and Alex Rivera, we go into a great explanation that the Holy Grail cup wasn’t just the vessel for the holy blood of Christ but was actually connected to the Krater of Hermes and the Ophite/Orphic Bowl of the coiled dragon-like serpent (please see our book for more details on this). It is also connected to the idol head that the Templars supposedly worshiped Author authors like Julius Evola, have argued for a non-Christian and even Hyperborean origin for the Grail legend, in his book The Mystery of the Grail, a possibility in which we will explore later in the second part of this post at a future point in time.

Julius Evola writes in the same book that there are certainly repeating patterns and archetypes that any student of Carl Jung would identify with clarity. It also ties into the mono-myth cycles of Joseph Campbell as we will see later:

When we isolate the texts that make up the Grail cycle, we find that they repeat a few essential themes, which are expressed through the symbolism of knightly figures and deeds. What we are dealing with, then, are essentially the themes of a mysterious center; of a quest and a spiritual test; of a regal succession or restoration, which sometimes assumes the character of a healing or avenging action. Percival, Gawain, Galahad, Ogier, Lancelot, and Peredur are essentially various names portraying the same human type; likewise, King Arthur, Joseph of Arimathea, Prester John, and the Fisher King are equivalent figures and variations on another theme. Also equivalent are images of various mysterious castles, islands, kingdoms, and inaccessible and adventurous lands, which in the narratives are described in a series that, on the one hand, creates a strange, surrealistic atmosphere but, on the other, often ends up becoming monotonous.

As the authors of Holy Blood Holy Grail have identified, the “divine blood” is an important concept and is one that repeats in the Bible, in both the Old and the New Testament as we will see. Evola further writes about all the objects associated with the Grail, especially of the blood:

In the various texts, the Grail is essentially portrayed under three forms:

“1. As an immaterial, self-moving object, of an indefinite and enigmatic nature (“it was not made of wood, nor of some metal, nor of stone, horn, or bone”).

As a stone-a “heavenly stone” and a “stone of light.”

As a cup, bowl or tray, often of gold and sometimes adorned with precious stones.

Both in this form and in the previous one, we almost always find women carrying the Grail (another element totally extraneous to any Christian ritual, since no priests appear in it). A mixed form is that of a cup carved out of a stone (sometimes of an emerald). The Grail is sometimes qualified as “holy;’ sometimes as “rich”; “this is the richest thing that any man hath living.”l This text, like many others of the same period, uses the expression “Sangreal;’ which is susceptible to three interpretations: Holy Grail, Royal Blood, and Regal Blood.”

Jack Curtis writes in The Quest for the Holy Grail, is essentially:

“… a system of self transformation that can be reconciled with other similar systems in the Western esoteric tradition. It is a cosmological scheme that is comparable with Tarot, Kabala and Astrology. There are also hints of a connection with Alchemy. All of these systems or schemes follow a unifying principle that points to one underlying reality. The Holy Grail in its 5 Transformations, is one approach to that reality. To achieve the Grail, is to understand reality. To understand reality, is to be transformed and to be saved.”

How does any of this tie into the blood of Jesus Christ? For that answer, we must look beyond the natural and the flesh. The blood is obviously symbolic in its spiritual meaning. It is the spiritual power behind the blood of Jesus in which the believer partakes in, and is eternally saved to be allowed to enter a place that is so radically different than the manifest world—being the “Kingdom of God.”

The Holy Blood

In Jesus’ death on the cross, we read that in John 19:32-38, especially verse 34:

32 So the soldiers came, and broke the legs of the first man and of the other who was crucified with Him; 33 but coming to Jesus, when they saw that He was already dead, they did not break His legs. 34 But one of the soldiers pierced His side with a spear, and immediately blood and water came out. 35 And he who has seen has testified, and his testimony is true; and he knows that he is telling the truth, so that you also may believe. 36 For these things came to pass to fulfill the Scripture, “Not a bone of Him shall be [a]broken.” “They shall look on Him whom they pierced.” 38 After these things Joseph of Arimathea, being a disciple of Jesus, but a secret one for fear of the Jews, asked Pilate that he might take away the body of Jesus; and Pilate granted permission. So he came and took away His body.

Note the extraordinary hiatus John introduces into the narrative at this point. Clearly he wants us to note something of supreme importance: the legend is that Joseph caught some of this blood and water in the chalice used for the last supper.

Eric Wargo in The Passion of Einstein: Light, Spacetime, and the Holy Grail, rightly points out:

I think we can really see the Grail as both objects simultaneously, and that its atemporal “absurdity” is essential to the salvific nature of Christ’s blood: How could the blood shed on the Cross have gotten into the cup of the Last Supper other than by having traveled back in time? Christ’s blood is either made of tachyons (hypothetical faster-than-light particles that most physicists currently reject) or is, in effect,outside of linear Time altogether. Only if Christ’s blood is outside of Time and Cause does it make sense that the cup that once ever held it must have always held it and will keep holding it eternally—and there is just one thing known to physics that has those properties: The blood of Christ is, in effect, light.

Blood symbolism is extremely important in the Grail mythos: In the Old Testament, it is the substance of life. Jewish temple worship revolved around the outpouring of blood, and sprinkling of blood via animal sacrifice. It is taken into the Holy of Holies and sprinkled on the mercy seat on the Day of Atonement (Leviticus 16). Blood atones for sin and makes everything holy again. It is the seat of the spirit within the body, but it is also the animated life-force, of the body. It is that which contains, as it were, the soul of the body.

Jesus, as the Heavenly Priest of Melchizedek, also wearing the breastplate of Aaron. Also known as the “Urim and Thummim.” It is clear that Jesus is the “initiator” for the “Mysteries” of God in the Heavenly Temple.

Over at Temple Secrets, Tony Badillo explains that the animal sacrifice and its sacrificial blood represented a separation between the sins and a person’s spirit/soul:

On Ezekiel 44:6, 7 the Lord rebukes “rebellious” Israel for profaning his temple by offering him food in an unacceptable manner. What is his food? According to v. 7, “the fat and the blood;” similarly in v. 15 where only the Zadok priests may ”offer me the fat and the blood, says the Lord God”. There you have it! His “food” is blood and fat! Should we accept this literally? Yes, in the sense that blood and fat were literally offered to him. But No because he did not consume either. Why does he say this, then? Because the blood, actually poured outside into a Temple drain, symbolizes the spirit’s separation/expiation from sin; while the fat, when turned into smoke, symbolizes the spirit’s ascension to him for acceptance. God’s “food,” then, is simply the language of symbol, and it means that separation/expiation from sin (by the blood) and ascension of purified souls (the rising smoke) are the things he desires from people.

In John 6:53-56, Jesus says to his disciples:

Most assuredly, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink His blood, you have no life in you. Whoever eats My flesh and drinks My blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up at the last day. For My flesh is food indeed, and My blood is drink indeed. He who eats My flesh and drinks My blood abides in Me, and I in him.

Jesus implores his followers to consume his divine flesh and blood made up of spiritual light to regenerate their own fallen meat sacks degenerated as a result of Adam and Eve’s exile from Eden and from the consumption of the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil. Hence, the Holy Grail cup is said to contain the Christ’s saving blood of the Lamb—the remnant or leftover spiritual substance dripping from a primal trauma of a divine being, who is crucified by the rulers and authorities of the lower heavens, dies and resurrects so that his followers can follow his example, so that they might be salvaged from the sinfulness of the lower world/cosmos of the devil, which is destined to be overthrown, cast out and destroyed at the end of the apocalypse. The saved and elect are transferred into a new kingdom or reality of God while the rest who rejected the Gospel are destroyed.

Many of the Cathars believed what the mythicist scholar Earl Doherty theorizes was the earliest form of docetic Christology: that Christ was never incarnate on earth. Most of the radical dualist Cathars believed that the whole Jesus narrative, from the beginning of his ministry to his crucifixion, occurred in the heavenly world of the good god and in the astral realm of the demonic rulers.

In the Parzival romance, the impotency of the Fisher King being his maimed, never-healing state (all thanks to Klingsor’s Spear) reflects the sterility of his land. It also reflects the nature of matter itself. In the studies of pagan practices by such scholars as Sir James G. Frazer in The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion, the recurring themes of the killing of the previous high priest or king to be replaced by a new avatar (much like John the Baptist and Jesus) and the marriage of fruitfulness of this new avatar with a female deity/queen is essential to the vegetative and natural fertility and prosperity of the land. The mirroring effect between the human enactment of natural prosperity and vice versa is apparent enough in the Priest-king of the Grail, Anfortas or the Fisher King’s “Waste Land” is to appropriate this mythic pagan belief into a solid representation that the barrenness of the soul/mind and body reflects upon the surroundings/ environment and nature. This, one might say is the objective co-relative function where the emotions, experiences of the subject becomes objective reality, hence the idea that the imaginal/spirit/ideal realm controls the realm of matter and the manifest world.

It is said that the blood of Christ at Holy Communion in Catholic ritual gives new life and deifies. But that blood is wine transfigured by the descending Holy Spirit in the form of a dove. However, this ritual does seem to have strong vampiric, witchcraft cannibalistic undertones, if placed in a literal context as the Catholic Church has done for hundreds, if not thousands of years. The Cathars were infamous for being hard, uncompromising opponents of the Catholic Sacrament as well as its icons and its worship of the Virgin Mary as devilish trickery to commit idolatry. Various Gnostic groups like the Phibionites, Barbelites, Bororites, Simonians, etc. as well as the Jews (and their rituals as magic in the form of “blood libel”) were accused of human and infant sacrifice in the form of ritually consuming fetuses, in the case that women became pregnant in their infamous orgies. In these ritual orgies, semen and menses were said to be also ritually consumed as a Eucharistic sacrament to Christ as Epiphanius claims in the Panarion. All of this seems to originate in Pliney the Elder in Natural History 30.11, when he writes as a matter-of-fact, that certain magical rites of the Magi (and Emperor Nero) involve ritually killing and eating men (e.g. cannibalism):

The Magi have certain means of evasion; for example that the gods neither obey those with freckles nor are seen by them. Was this perhaps their objection to Nero? But his body was without blemish; he was free to choose the fixed days, could easily obtain perfectly black sheep, and as for human sacrifice, he took the greatest delight in it.

So, in other words, could the Catholic Eucharist be just a Christianized magical ritual? We certainly see Romans who viewed the Christians as simply a diabolical secret society addicted to sorcery and the conjuring of daimons, as seen in Celsus in the True Doctrine and Suetonius in Nero 16.2. All of this seems to be a precursor for the Medieval and modern gossip and rumors of witch covens and Satanic elite secret societies, like the “Illuminati” who engage in human sacrifice and Faustian pacts with demons. The drinking of wine in Dionysian rituals involved ritually imbibing the spirit of Dionysus, which is like drinking the Elixir of Life, or “being baptized in wisdom.” The wine is the blood of the earth, “fruit of the vine and work of human hands.” This wine is used as a commemoration of ritually consuming the blood of Jesus. The Gospel of John chapter 2, where Jesus transmutes water into wine certainly plays on this distinctly Dionysian idea. So the outpouring of Christ’s blood on the cross is the outpouring of his very life—the spirit of the Son of God.

The Book of Hebrews (9:22-24) tells us that the blood of Jesus (and all the Old Testament sacrifices) were necessary in order to cleanse things in the heavens–the same place in which the angelic rebellion was said to have occurred as recorded in Revelation.

“And almost all things are by the law purged with blood; and without shedding of blood is no remission. It was therefore necessary that the patterns of things in the heavens should be cleansed with these; but the heavenly things themselves with better sacrifices than these. For Christ is not entered into the holy places made with hands, which are the figures of the true; but into heaven itself, now to appear in the presence of God for us.”

Colossians 1:20 says something very similar:

“And, having made peace through the blood of his cross, by him to reconcile all things unto himself; by him, I say, whether they be things in earth, or things in heaven.“

Notice how in Hebrews, it says that the tabernacle, and all its services, were “patterns of things in the heavens.” The physical objects associated with the earthly sanctuary were “figures of the true” — the “shadow of heavenly things” (Hebrews 8:5). As it follows, each physical item had its spiritual counterpart in heaven. So, as long as there was a tabernacle or temple on earth, there was a material reflection of God’s heavenly palace for mankind to see and take part in. This all sounds strangely reminiscent of certain Hermetic writings pertaining to “as above, so below.”

Also, in a way, when Jesus Christ was nailed to the Cross, he was essentially nailed to a circular “Leviathan” which is the same as the Ouroboros of the Gnostic alchemists like Mary the Jewess, Zosimos and the Ophites. The atheistic German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche uses this symbolism to build his own theory of “eternal recurrence.” This is what the Gnostics called the “fall of spirit into matter.” Hence, we have various alchemical images of the crucified serpent, and perhaps even the same tempting serpent from Eden. According to the Apocryphon of John, there are a few archons that seem to have strong serpentine and dragon-like features, including Iao and Ialdabaoth, the chief archon and Gnostic parody of Jehovah. All of this seems to have a Pauline basis, in Colossians 2:13-15

…When you were dead in your transgressions and the uncircumcision of your flesh, He made you alive together with Him, having forgiven us all our transgressions, having canceled out the certificate of debt consisting of decrees against us, which was hostile to us; and He has taken it out of the way, having nailed it to the cross. When He had disarmed the rulers and authorities, He made a public display of them, having triumphed over them through Him.…

In the Gospel of Matthew (20:20-23), we read that a mother of Zebedee was asking Jesus to have her sons sit at his right and the other at his left hand in the Kingdom of God. Jesus asks her sons if they can drink what he is going to drink and they answer in the affirmative. Here is what Jesus says as a reply:

20 Then the mother of Zebedee’s sons came to Jesus with her sons and, kneeling down, asked a favor of him. 21 “What is it you want?” he asked. She said, “Grant that one of these two sons of mine may sit at your right and the other at your left in your kingdom.” 22 “You don’t know what you are asking,” Jesus said to them. “Can you drink the cup I am going to drink?” “We can,” they answered. 23 Jesus said to them, “You will indeed drink from my cup, but to sit at my right or left is not for me to grant. These places belong to those for whom they have been prepared by my Father.”

The Baptism of Blood and Water

In Genesis 1, the Spirit hovers over the face of the deep at the onset of creation. Water signifies the chaotic, untamed and unformed material of creation. It is the proto-element out of which all creation, the whole cosmos, including humanity, is ultimately made (Gen 1:2, 6; Ps 29:3) So crossing the waters of the great Flood, the waters of the Red Sea, the waters of the Jordan, and the waters of baptism are the recreating and renewing waters of creation. This water baptism acts like a conduit that transports the believer from one world (the old man of sin) to another (the newness in Christ). Likewise, priests must bathe in water before entering the Holy of Holies of the Temple of Solomon on the day of Atonement.

Similarly the Sea of Glass in Revelation 15:2, beside which those who have defeated the beast are standing, singing the song of Moses. This is a reflection of the “Molten Sea” which was a large basin in the Temple in Jerusalem made by Solomon for the ablution of the priests. It is described in 1 Kings 7 and 2 Chronicles 4. It stood in the southeastern corner of the inner court.

Water in essence is a unifying yet all-dissolving element of the earth and the cosmos. Blood and water together, therefore, signify the fullness of saved humanity: material body and animating soul and spirit as well as the sacrificed body and blood of the Lord Jesus Christ. In the Gospel of John 3:5, we have Jesus saying to Nicodemus “you must be born of water and the Spirit.” In 1 John 5:6, it says, “This is he who came by water and blood – Jesus Christ…there are three that testify: the Spirit and the water and the blood.”

We need to pause for a moment to reflect on this: the incarnated Son of God took on the likeness of humanity upon himself, meaning that this was not his original nature: this humanity, united to the Second Person of the Trinity, is literally poured out from his side upon the cross. This body and blood is NOT the same as the body and blood of communion, although they are clearly related. The bread and wine of Holy Communion are the substance and blood of the earth, transfigured by the Spirit of God to become our spiritual food and drink as the Eucharist.

The chalice in itself is not the real Holy Grail—that is simply romantic myth. The real Holy Grail is the very ground onto which this blood and water is sprinkled upon. The earth itself received the body and soul of Christ in his death. This is the blood and water of his sacrifice, rather than the blood and body of communion, although again, clearly the two are related. The bread and wine of communion—Christ’s body and blood—rather than being consumed by us to become part of our body, performs a spiritual function, transforming us into the body of Christ. “Though we are many, we are one body because we all share in the one bread.” Thus consuming Christ’s body and blood transforms us into itself. Likewise, with Christ’s blood and body out poured on the cross—it transforms the whole of creation into Christ’s body. Christ’s physical presence, although hidden, still abides throughout the very fabric of the universe. His humanity, which is our humanity, abides in creation, even today, transforming it and making it holy. In a sense, this relates to the infamous Baptism of Wisdom ritual of the Knights Templar in which we discuss in the book, at length.

Christ’s crucifixion and the Harrowing of Hell, in effect, unseated and usurped the power and possession of the authorities, archons and their demonic possession of the world and perhaps even the “Wasteland” of the Fisher King, a reflection of the inner state of the sinner. The quest for the holy grail to heal the wounded king and to restore the land to its original, pristine, Edenic state. Many see this as related to Matthew 4:19 in which Christ said, “Follow me, and I will make you fishers of men.” This reference would later become crucial to the Christian version of the Fisher King of the Arthurian Grail romances.

As one can see, the Parzival/Arthurian Grail stories, like the story of the Temple of Solomon is simply a retelling of Genesis (as well as a intricate visual depiction of the “Divine Man” or “Son of Man”), which in itself is a reflection of the war in heaven, and the fall of the angels. The Titanomachy of the Greeks as well as Hesiod’s Works (126) also speaks of similar tales of Olympian gods struggling against the titans and their terrible giant children, which no doubt mirror the infamous Nephilim of Genesis 6 and Enochian literature. Hesiod in the same text describes these Nephilim as being Heroes of the “Silver Race,” as a gigantic, brutal and ferocious giants:

Then, a second race, far inferior Was created, of Silver, by the gods…

Being reared by their mothers.

And when they reached adolescence,

They died a painful death,

On account of their stupidity,

For they could not contain their foolish pride and refused to worship the gods above and to sacrifice to them upon the altars.

Hesiod calls them “big children” (mega nepios) and tells how, disgusted with their impiety and arrogance, Zeus decided to wipe them off with a cataclysm, burying them in Tartarus, much like how Jehovah sends a flood to wipe the giant children of the Watchers and condemns the fallen angels in the abyss-like underworld in chains. Essentially all mythologies speak of similar wars between Blacks and Whites or between Angels and Devils, Devas and Asuras, Daevas, and Ahuras, the Sons of Light and the Sons of Darkness, Gods and Titans, etc., etc. This all seems to influence the story of Klingsor who injures the Fisher King with a spear. Klingsor also happens to be directly related with Faustus.

Once again, we cannot ignore Tony Badillo’s thoughtful explanation of Eden with those who are baptized in the Holy Spirit being the Spirit of God, which have strong Gnostic undertones:

…in Isaiah 58:11 and Jeremiah 31:12 the people themselves are a “well watered garden,” implying that Paradise on earth consists of an ideal relationship between God and humans. This is a key reason why the Divine spirit is not given solely or primarily for uttering profound prophecies, performing marvelous miracles, or making doomsday declarations, but for subduing the Sinful Inclination and renewing God’s “image and likeness” within each of us, and in so doing we become like a well watered garden, Genesis 2:10, bearing good fruit for the one who did the planting. This is the true Paradise, the true Garden of Eden while we are here on earth. And that which waters one’s personal garden is the Divine spirit.

The sprinkling of his blood on the earth, prefigured in the Old Testament by the sprinkling of the blood of the sacrificial bull and goat in the Holy of Holies, has made the world the Holy of Holies, the dwelling place of God, signified by the rending of the veil in the Temple. Yet it remains hidden, invisible, and unknown, until the day that the new heaven and new earth are revealed when Christ returns again in glory as discussed in Matthew and Revelation. Just like the hiddenness of the glory of God, momentarily revealed in the burning bush, or on the Mount of Transfiguration. On that day we will see that “in him we live and move and have our being.” The sacrificial bull concept, however, is an ancient Rome and eventually later from Mithraic sacrificial rites. The Gospel of John tells us that after the death and resurrection of Jesus, the Baptism of the Holy Spirit is made manifest to the believer, and the Body of Christ.

According to the Excerpts of Theodotus, the Valentinian teacher Theodotus said that the baptism releases the believer from the clutches of passions, Fate, destiny, and demonic powers that infest the lower world in which mankind finds himself exiled in.

76 As, therefore, the birth of the Saviour released us from “becoming” and from Fate, so also his baptism rescued us from fire, and his Passion rescued us from passion in order that we might in all things follow him. For he who was baptised unto God advanced toward God and has received “power to walk upon scorpions and snakes,” the evil powers. And he commands the disciples “When ye go about, preach and them that believe baptise in the name of the Father, and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit,” in whom we are born again, becoming higher than all the other powers.

77 Therefore baptism is called death and an end of the old life when we take leave of the evil principalities, but it is also called life according to Christ, of which he is sole Lord. But the power of the transformation of him who is baptised does not concern the body but the soul, for he who comes up [out of the water] is unchanged. From the moment when he comes up from baptism he is called a servant of God even by the unclean spirits and they now “tremble” at him whom shortly before they obsessed.

78 Until baptism, they say, Fate is real, but after it the astrologists are no longer right. But it is not only the washing that is liberating, but the knowledge of/who we were, and what we have become, where we were or where we were placed, whither we hasten, from what we are redeemed, what birth is and what rebirth.

The Foundation Stone of Fallen Angels

The holy grail also has a strong Hermetic ring to it as Tracy and I have explored in depth in our book. We point out that the word “grail” itself has been derived from crater, the Greco-Latin term for a vessel, meaning a shallow vessel or plate where sacrifices were offered to the gods in ancient Greece. We also explore in depth how the Holy Grail concept is directly tied with the Corpus Hermeticum, as well as Wolfram’s Parzival, which is in itself almost a paraphrase of the Hermetica- a collection of ancient Egyptian texts that also reflect the Gnosticizing tendencies of Alexandria, Egypt. Wolfram rewrote it to match it with thirteenth-century German sensibility. The Holy Grail themes seem to greatly match with the Krater of the Hermetica which directly mirror Parzival’s spiritual journey. In fact, as the above link quotes a book called The Krater and the Grail: Hermetic Sources of the Parzival by Henry and Renee Kahane as towards the end of Parzival, they compare the precision of knights in the Grail Castle to the universe and the Holy Grail itself to the Monad as I.M. Oderberg writes:

A procession comprising the knights and the twenty-four maidens attending the Grail entered the hall, only Repanse de Schoie being permitted by the sacred object to be its bearer. These attendants were grouped in numbers, first four, then eight, then twelve divided into two sixes. Each group carried corresponding numbers of lights. Last came the “princess” of the Grail carrying one. This sequence has baffled many commentators, but Kahane and Kahane point out the marked similarity with the Hermetica, where the groups in the same order “represent the twenty-four stations of the journey of the soul: 4 elements + 8 spheres + 12 signs of the zodiac + 1, the Monad. . . . The Grail procession, in other words, is a representation of the mystic journey of the soul towards the Monad, itself symbolized by the Grail” (op. cit., pp. 105-6).

The end of the Grail quest is the return to the source of life and rebirth into it as divinely self-conscious entities purified by involvement in earthly experiences and having also contributed to the ongoing process of cosmic evolution by refining the substance they have used. The great lesson for Parzival — for all of us because he is our prototype — was the interconnected relationship of all earth entities. The bonds of a universal brotherhood make us all kin. The suffering of one hurts all, and compassion in our heart obliges us to ask forever: What ails our brother?

What could be the most interesting aspect of this story, involves looking at the second clue of what the Holy Grail represents, provided by Wolfram in the form of “a precious stone, lapsit exillis (i.e. lapis or lapsi ex caelis) of special purity, possessing miraculous powers conferred upon it and sustained by a consecrated Host”, which is indeed the blood of Christ, with holy powers to act as the Elixir of Life. This precious stone fallen from heaven is both the emerald fallen from Lucifer’s crown.

Wolfram von Eschenbach identified the Holy Grail as a Stone of Heaven, he knew he was alluding to a Holy Grail tradition that had extended far back into the mists of time. Many traditions tell that primitive man, experienced a physical and or emotional change just by being in proximity to certain stones. Even the term “magic,” associated with the title of “Magus” or “magician” has its etymological roots in the force of magnets or magnetism, which plays into the idea of “greatness,” or “magnifying” one’s spirit or essential self under the light of God. Perhaps this is why Simon was called “Megas” Greek for “Great” which sounds virtually the same as “Magus.” The Persians thought of their priests as “magos” as well.

Alchemists told of transforming a base metal into gold and a human into a god or goddess. Many texts were cataloged of the Muslim Empire by the Sufis, who added their own alchemical data before transmitting it to their students, the Knights Templar, who took the wisdom into Europe and supposedly carried in tradition through Freemasonry. Those indoctrinated were of the Holy grail Mysteries and eventually given the wisdom of the Alchemical or Philosophers Stone. Some tell of it being a platter or bowl full of precious stones. The Stone of Heaven is a Latin translation of the term Lapsit Exillus, closely related to Lapis Elixir, an appellation used by the Sufis that denoted, “Philosopher’s Stone.” Lapsit derived from “stone” and related to the Latin lapsus, meaning fallen, thus denoting “fallen stone.” Since the term Exillus is related to exillis stellis, meaning : “from the stars,” the entire moniker Lapsit Exillus literally translates as “The Stone of the Heavens” or “The Stone which came down from the Stars.”

The name Stone of Heaven can also be derived from the word Grail. The term Grail is derived from the French gres or Persian gohr, both denoting a stone. The Grail of Greal could also be related to the French grele, meaning hailstone, which is a “stone” from heaven. According to Arthur Edward Waite, the term Lapsit Exillus is “Exiles Stone.” This surprisingly affiliates the Stone of heaven with Heaven’s most notorious exile, Lucifer. A poem of a German heritage called, Wartburgkrieg, the “Wartburg War,” summarizes the heavenly battle between Lucifer and St. Michael, and identifies the Stone of Heaven as a large emerald that became dislodged from Lucifer’s crown and descended to Earth:

“Shall I then bring the crown

That was made by 60,000 angels?ill

Who wished to force GOD out of the Kingdom of Heaven.

See! Lucifer, there he is!

If there are master-priests,

Then you know well that I am singing the truth.

Saint Michael saw GOD’s anger, plagued by His insolence.

He took (Lucifer’s) crown from his head,

In such a way that a stone jumped out of it.

Which on Earth became Parsifal’s stone.

The stone which sprang out of it,

He found it, he who struggled for honor at such a high cost.”

Lucifer’s fall that is incorporated into this poem first popularized by the Prophet Isaiah during his harangue against the King of Babylon. When describing the decline and all of the King of Babylon, Isaiah used the metaphor of the Morning star’s “fall” or descent below the horizon at sunrise, an image subsequently became linked to Lucifer when translated into Latin was Luz-I-fer or Lucifer, the Light Bringer. Morning Star then became known as Shahar or Helel, which were the names of Venus’ dawn appearance. Thus, Lucifer is associated with both Venus and Helel, a name that evolved into Hell, Lucifer’s underworld home.

In the Book of Ezekiel, he expanded upon the meaning of Lucifer’s infamous fall. While comparing the King of Tyre with Lucifer, Ezekiel identifies Lucifer as the anointed cherub and forever-young boy who once walked in the Garden of Eden while covered in precious stones, including the emerald, and was perfect in his ways and from that day he was created until iniquity was found in him. Thus Ezekiel perpetuated the tradition of Isaiah by making Lucifer’s fall the product of pride.

Ezekiel 28:13 tells us:

You were in Eden, the garden of God; every precious stone adorned you: carnelian, chrysolite and emerald, topaz, onyx and jasper, lapis lazuli, turquoise and beryl. Your settings and mountings were made of gold; on the day you were created they were prepared.

Lucifer then resolves to rule in Heaven and this culminated in his expulsion from Paradise. When St. Michael and his angels fought with Lucifer/Samael over his right to rule, states John the Revelator, “that old serpent, called the devil, and Satan which deceiveth the whole world…was cast out (of heaven) into the earth, and his angels were cast with him.”

The remainder of Lucifer’s legend in the poem states that during the battle with Michael, an emerald became dislodged from Lucifer’s crown and fell to Earth. This is based on Ezekiel’s description of the gems-especially the emerald-that adorned Lucifer’s regalia in the Garden of Eden. It is also influenced by the Knights Templar. But of course this predates the Templar’s by many thousand of years. Before their time the emerald had been recognized as the esteemed Stone of Venus, the “fallen star” of Lucifer.

Strangely enough, however, Lucifer does seem to embody the twin archetype we see over and over in world mythologies. In a way, Michael the archangel could also very well be his angelic twin, just as Metatron is said to have an angelic twin soul in the form of Sandalphon. Both of these angels’ lower selves exist in the forms of both Enoch and Elijah, both of which are intimately connected with Hermes Trismegistus. In Roman myths, we have Romulus and Remus, in Genesis, Cain and Abel, Ariman and Angra Manyu in Persia, the Ashvin Twins, or Mitra and Varuna in India; Zeus and Poseidon, Castor and Pollux, Apollo and Dionysus and Hercules and Atlas in Greece; Set-Typhon and Horus in Egypt, etc. In a way, Lucifer is simply a reflection of the Supreme Heavenly Father, who is the spiritual sun of Heaven.

As the story goes, a number of angels remained neutral and inactive during the battle of Lucifer and the rebel angels against God and the faithful heavenly hosts, after Lucifer’s fall they were condemned by God to support this stone, which had dropped from Lucifer’s crown, hovering between Heaven and Earth until the hour of the redemption of sinful mankind and the “Day of Judgement” at the end of the apocalypse. Then they brought it to Earth, and, formed into a holy vessel, it served for the dish out of which the Jews ate the Paschal lamb in Exodus 12 on Passover, and in which Joseph of Arimathea received the Saviour’s blood, and perhaps even the receptacle for the severed head of John the Baptist.

By uniting the two objects, being the kraters and with meteoritic stones fallen from heaven, it becomes obvious. We see ancient worship of meteorites in the Kaaba Stone of Mecca in Saudia Arabia, which is associated with the worship of Venus/Lucifer and Saturn/Chronos, the pyramids of Mexico, the vajra thunderbolt of Hinduism, etc. So the Grail is indeed the meteorite crater opened up by a falling object from the heavens. It may also refer to volcanic activity and magma, associated with the conflagration spoken by the ancients that is said to have destroyed Atlantis-Eden.

Rudolf Steiner, the Austrian philosopher and esotericist famously reimagined the grail, foundation stone as a, “dodecahedron fashioned in copper in 1913 to consecrate the building called the first Goetheanum, with twelve, pentagonal (five-sided) facets and called the “dodecahedron of man.” (Bill Trusiewicz, The Foundation Stone as The Golden Triangle, The Mystic Hammer, and The Lost Word)

Bill Trusiewiscz further asks:

Firstly, we should ask: What is a foundation stone? Also called a “cornerstone,” a foundation stone is a stone ceremoniously set in place at the start of the construction of a building. This is done to initiate certain defining principles or ideas in connection with the proposed building with the intention of consecrating it for a specific purpose. It is, if you will, a “mental” building to use modern terminology, to correspond to a physical building proposed. Students of spiritual science would likely be comfortable with the idea that the “soul and spirit” foundations of the building were being laid alongside of the sense perceptible building itself.

Indeed, the Foundation Stone concept can be found all throughout the Old Testament and in the Jewish apocrypha, especially in 2 Enoch (see my paper “The Gods of Imagination: Alchemy, Magic, and the Quintessence” found in The Gnostic 6 by Andrew Phillip Smith). It is the starting point or even the “heart” in which the world and even the whole breadth of the cosmos is founded upon. It is also the Holy of Holies, in which it becomes the “cornerstone” of the Temple of Solomon, which is just another form of the Grail Temple of Parzival. Perhaps this is where the Theosophists would claim that Shamballah of Tibet would be the “heart of the earth” and the “King of the Earth” being “Sanat Kumara,” the so-called “Lord of the Flame” came from Venus! This is undoubtedly connected to Lucifer, the equivalent of Rex Mundi of the Cathars, Melek Taus of the Yezidis, Satan “the god of this world/cosmos” to St. Paul and Ialdabaoth and his legions of archons to the Gnostics. As it follows, the foundation stone is currently owned by Lucifer on his crown, since he is essentially the “prince of the world,” as the Fourth Gospel puts it, when he fell into the depths of the sub-lunar realm after the War in Heaven.

In The Creation and the Garden of Eden as Models for Temple Architecture by Jeffrey M. Bradshaw, he quotes from a not-so-easily identifiable source but it is worth quoting nonetheless:

The brightness of the Holy of Holies was the light of Day One, before the visible world had been created… Those who entered the Holy of Holies entered this place of light, beyond time and matter, which was the presence of “the King of kings and Lord of lords who alone has immortality and dwells in unapproachable light.” This was the place of glory to which Jesus knew he would return after the crucifixion, “the glory which I had with thee before the world was made.” In the Gospel of Thomas, Christians are described as the new high priesthood who enter the light, and Jesus instructed his disciples to say to the guardians (the cherub guardians of Eden?) “We came from the light, the place where the light came into being on its own accord and established [itself]…

Bradshaw rightly points out that the tabernacle of Moses is an earthly attempt to recapture the Edenic state that that man once held before the fall:

Carrying this idea forward to a later epoch, Exodus 40:33 describes how Moses completed the tabernacle. The Hebrew text exactly parallels the account of how God finished creation. Genesis Rabbah comments: “It is as if, on that day [i.e., the day the tabernacle was raised in the wilderness], I actually created the world.” With this idea in mind, Hugh Nibley has famously called the temple “a scale-model of the universe.” As a complement to the view of the Creation as a model for the temple, BYU Professor Donald W. Parry has argued that the Garden of Eden can be seen as a natural “temple,” where Adam and Eve lived in God’s presence for a time, and mirroring the configuration of the heavenly temple intended as their ultimate destination.

Bradshaw concludes that the temple symbolism of Revelation also carries on this Edenic/Solomonic tradition:

Fittingly, just as the first book of the Bible, Genesis, recounts the story of Adam and Eve being cast out from the Garden, its last book, Revelation, prophesies a permanent return to Eden for the sanctified.36 In that day, the veil that separates man and the rest of fallen creation from God will be swept away, and all shall be “done in earth, as it is in heaven.”37 In the original Garden of Eden, “there was no need for a temple—because Adam and Eve enjoyed the continual presence of God”—likewise, in John’s vision “there was no temple in the Holy City, ‘for its temple is the Lord God.’”38 To reenter the Garden at that happy day is to return to the original spiritual state of immortality and innocence through forgiveness of sin, and to know the oneness that existed at the dawn of Creation, before the creative processes of division and separation began. The premortal glory of the righteous shall then be “added upon” 39 as they receive a fullness of the blessings of sanctification, “coupled with eternal glory, which glory we do not now enjoy.”

The Even ha’Shettiya, also known as the “Stone of Foundation,” which currently resides within the eight-sided Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, the Holy City and center and heart of the earth as European mapmakers charted.

This is the same rock that supposedly was the same rocky site upon which Abraham was coerced into sacrificing his own son Isaac in the sight of Jehovah, to test his faith, as well as the place where Mohammed was lifted into Heaven by the archangel Gabriel. This is also the same site where the Knights Templar resided nearby when they founded modern-day Jerusalem. So the Stone of Foundation for the Jews, Muslims, and the Catholic Crusaders was in fact, the Stone of Lucifer as part of the Axis Mundi or column that unites Heaven and Earth, and even the Underworld. King David, who purchased the rock of the Even ha’Shetityya from the Jebusites as the location of the Ark of the Covenant, was not overlooked by him. This sacred object primarily served as a vehicle for communication with Jehovah/Yahweh.

King Solomon holding the Grail Temple and Royal Scepter.

David’s son, King Solomon, a famous alchemist, similarly thought that the stone’s alchemical properties as a mediator between Heaven and Earth, used the rock as a cornerstone or foundation for his famous Temple, which would draw upon the power and spirit of YHWH. We see the Testament of Solomon depicting Sabaoth as the god of Solomon, who gives him a magical ring through the archangel Michael to build the temple through the forced help of 72 goetic demon helpers. This is Sabaoth is probably the same deity as Abraxas. (This connection is fully explored further in depth in the book.)

Perhaps the pyramids of Egypt and Mexico were constructed by similar means through the use of demonic, supernatural power. Furthermore, perhaps this is what the Knights Templar were so drawn towards—the supernatural power behind the Temple of Solomon—the same power that would one day make them so rich that they would become a threat to French and Catholic nobility. It is this power that manifest itself in the form of a head of a man or even of a cat, and eventually from the Dionysian and Azazel-like goat head.

What is most fascinating as that the Freemasonic pontiff Albert Pike in Morals & Dogma seems to spur and condemn the idea that the Templars also worshiped Baphomet when he writes:

“[It is absurd to suppose that men of intellect adored a monstrous idol called Baphomet, or recognized Mahomet as an inspired prophet. Their symbolism, invented ages before, to conceal what it was dangerous to avow, was of course misunderstood by those who were not adepts, and to their enemies seemed to be pantheistic. The calf of gold, made by Aaron for the Israelites, was but one of the oxen under the laver of bronze, and the Karobim on the Propitiatory, misunderstood. The symbols of the wise always become the idols of the ignorant multitude. What the Chiefs of the Order really believed and taught, is indicated to the Adepts by the hints contained in the high Degrees of Free-Masonry, and by the symbols which only the Adepts understand.“

Pike is claiming that the symbolism associated with the Templars and Freemasonry is veiled and misunderstood by the masses also reflects the idea that the alchemical Philosopher’s Stone was simply a ruse created by alchemists to confuse the masses and mask their true and secret methods and sciences to create gold or something else completely. However, this doesn’t answer the general claim that a certain Templar possessed a severed idol head and turned to it to form their own Faustian pact with the spirit of Baphomet. We can gain more clarity on this subject from Sean Martin in The Knights Templar (p. 139):

Misunderstanding is almost certainly at the root of the allegation that the Templars worshipped an idol called Baphomet. Descriptions of it varied, but it was usually described as being a life-sized head, which was said to make the land fertile (as is said of the Grail). That the Templars did possess heads is without doubt. They possessed the head of St Euphemia of Chalcedon at their preceptory in Nicosia on Cyprus, and, more curiously, a silver head shaped reliquary was found after the arrests at the Paris Temple. This bore the inscription CAPUT LVIII, and inside it were parts of a woman’s skull (who was believed to have been one of the 11,000 virgins martyred at Cologne with St Ursula). The heads may have indeed been worshiped, in the way that the Celts revered the head.

The Assassins, during their initiation ceremonies, buried the initiate up to his neck in sand, leaving only the head visible, before disinterring him. Given their simulation of Saracen torture, the Templars may also have carried out this practice. A further possibility is that Baphomet, long thought to be a mistranslation of ‘Mahomet’ (the Prophet Muhammad), could well be a corruption of the Arabic word abufihamat, which means ‘Father of Understanding’, a reference to a spiritual seeker after realization or enlightenment has taken place: ‘The Baphomet is none other than the symbol of the completed man.’44 It is therefore possible that the supposed head the Templars worshipped was actually a metaphorical head. That Hugues de Payen’s shield carried three black heads suggests that certain elements within the Order – the upper echelons perhaps – were involved with esoteric disciplines learned from the Sufis from the very beginning of the Temple’s existence.

Could these “alchemical heads” be code words for a secret knowledge held by the minds of the initiated as well as literal severed heads who supposedly “prophesied”? The Templars were also said to have in their possession, ritual skulls made out of precious metals and human bone covered in gold and silver. These skulls may have been their own deceased brethren. There are testimonies taken from the Catholic inquisitions that purport of the Templars alluding to possessing metallic skulls used in Templar ceremonies, especially in the legend of The Necromantic Skull Of Sidon.

Skulls tend to be used in ancestor worship and also happen to be the premiere emblem of Mexican commemoration of the Dia de los Muertos (“Day of the Dead” being a pre-Colombian tradition of ancestor worship and colonial Catholicism) and demonic deity of the drug cartels, Santa Muerte, a mixture of the Virgin Mary (who, herself is the Catholic version of Astarte and Ishtar/Lilith) and the Aztec god of death Mictlantecuhtli. The Yale Masonic secret society of the “Skull & Bones,” a Satanic club of which a string of U.S. Presidents belong to (John Kerry, the Bush family, etc.) via secret oaths and initiation rites into diabolism similar to the ones found in Templar Baphometic rites. These “Bonesmen” have their origins in the so-called “Bavarian Illuminati” who themselves come from the Jesuits, whose saints are often depicted next to skulls or holding skulls. There are paintings depicting Mary Magdalene holding a skull as well.

Georges_de_La_Tour_-_Magdalen_of_Night_Light_-_WGA12337

The famous skull and crossbones motif normally associated with pirates is often said to have originated with this skull from Sidon, but it was probably much older. This haunting motif, which we today associate with poison, was most likely a symbol related to the earlier alchemical rites of the Templar Knights. During these early rites, skulls were used representing “Caput Mortumm” or “Dead Head,” which refers to a stage in alchemy preceding creation of the “Philosophers Stone,” which is the Great Work of the alchemists, equated with spiritualized gold. This is the stage of “Nigredo” or the “blackening” in Hades/Hell. The Gnostic-Hermetist Zosimos depicts this stage in the most extreme and gruesome imagery in his alchemical work Visions.

The most important skull or head used in the rites of the Knights Templar was known within the Order as Baphomet. This most sacred of heads, which many of the Knights alluded to during their depositions preceding their French trial, may have been that of John the Baptist, whose head was acquired by the Templar’s as part of treasure they looted from Constantinople during the Fourth Crusade in the 11th century. Even stranger is the fact that this Baphomet skull could also be related to the head of Simon Magus–one of the bad guys featured in the Book of Acts.

However, the idea that the Templars revered Baphomet in its Gnosticized form, seems to be a later additional detail that emerges during the French Revolution and was later emphasized by the likes of Purgstall, Eliphas Levi, Aleister Crowley, etc. Whatever the case may be, it seems as though the Templar treasure is somehow tied with the symbolism of the head, the mind, as well as the Holy Grail cup which is associated with drinking the wisdom of various Hermetic and Gnostic deities and alchemists like Zosimos, as we explain in the book. Indeed, even the Holy Grail/Fisher King legends themselves have strong associations with Gnosticism, and it is this heresy that Roman Catholicism greatly desired to have stamped out of existence and absorbed into their own “universal” collective religion.

Marcion and Empedocles: The Gnosis of Love and Discord

The Church Father and anti-Pope Hippolytus in Refutations of All Heresies (1.3) writes about the pre-Socratic and Orphic philosopher Empedocles:

But Empedocles, born after these, advanced likewise many statements respecting the nature of demons, to the effect that, being very numerous, they pass their time in managing earthly concerns. This person affirmed the originating principle of the universe to be discord and friendship, and that the intelligible fire of the monad is the Deity, and that all things consist of fire, and will be resolved into fire; with which opinion the Stoics likewise almost agree, expecting a conflagration. But most of all does he concur with the tenet of transition of souls from body to body, expressing himself thus:–“For surely both youth and maid I was, And shrub, and bird, and fish, from ocean stray’d.”

This (philosopher) maintained the transmutation of all souls into any description of animal. For Pythagoras, the instructor of these (sages), asserted that himself had been Euphorbus, who sewed in the expedition against Ilium, alleging that he recognised his shield. The foregoing are the tenets of Empedocles.

Hippolytus makes it clear that it is his mission to expose many Gnostic heresies is fueled by also explaining the doctrines and ideas of the philosophers and the pagan mysteries, including Empedocles and his master Pythagoras, which he connects to Marcion. In a nutshell, Hippolytus was trying very hard to say that all the Gnostic mystery schools were nothing more than clever rip-offs of the pagan myths, legends and philosophy. According to some mythicists, the same can be said for Christianity in general. Hippolytus also makes it clear that his main argument in Refutation (V11. 29-31) is that Marcion is a parasite of Empedocles’s mysteries, who is also treated as a follower of Pythagoras. While much has written about Marcion and his heresy and doctrines, there isn’t much written in regards to how and why Hippolytus compares him to the presocratic philosopher.

Bust of Empedocles

Hippolytus writes about Marcion’s heresy and apparent plagiarism from Empedocles:

This (heretic) having thought that the multitude would forget that he did not happen to be a disciple of Christ, but of Empedocles, who was far anterior to himself, framed and formed the same opinions, — namely, that there are two causes of the universe, discord and friendship. For what does Empedocles say respecting the plan of the world? Even though we have previously spoken (on this subject), yet even now also, for the purpose, at all events, of comparing the heresy of this plagiarist (with its source), we shall not be silent.

According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, it states how Empedocles went astray from sticking to his Pythagorean roots when he was suddenly exiled from a “blessed life” since he spilled animal blood and ate animal flesh as part of a ritual sacrifice:

In the opening lines, the narrator of the poem, who is presumably Empedocles, describes himself as a god, received as such by the cities to which he travels. To them he dispenses advice, prophecies, and cures (B 112). This god is actually a spirit—a daimôn—who has been exiled from the blessed life of the other spirits by breaking an oath and shedding blood (by killing and eating animals: see below). He wanders throughout the natural world, rejected by the very elements, because he put his trust in raving Strife (B 115). Exiled daemons are reincarnated into all sorts of living forms, finally coming to be as prophets, poets, physicians, and leaders among men.

So the ultimate aim of a daimonic philosopher is to journey back to a state of purity by siding with Love instead of Strife. This applies to the shedding of blood and to live a conscious life. Marcion was also known to tell his fellowship to abstain from meat and wine as well and forbade his followers from sexual intercourse and marriage. Love or Friendship leads the punished souls inside the realm of Strife and Discord (compared with the Demiurge) out from the world and into a realm of unity as Hippolytus says.

The souls, then, thus detested, and tormented, and punished in this world, are, according to Empedocles, collected by Friendship as being a certain good (power), and (one) that pities the groaning of these, and the disorderly and wicked device of furious Discord. And (likewise Friendship is) eager, and toils to lead forth little by little the souls from the world, and to domesticate them with unity, in order that all things, being conducted by herself, may attain unto unification. Therefore on account of such an arrangement on the part of destructive Discord of this divided world, Empedocles admonishes his disciples to abstain from all sorts of animal food. For he asserts that the bodies of animals are such as feed on the habitations of punished souls.

Not only is there similarities between Marcion and Empedocles, but also the later and the Prophet Manes. For Manes or Mani, the Two Roots or universal principles (Do Bun in Persian) are Light and Dark. The Tree of Life and the Tree of Death. It is said that the teachings of the Greek scholars, Empedocles and Pythagoras were passed down to Mani by the teacher Scythianus, whom it is said, lived at the time of the Apostles (although there is no evidence that Scythianus even existed). Empedocles is a source for the doctrine of the four elements (fire, water, air, earth), even as it manifests itself in Hippocrates and Galen’s teaching of the four humours. This is a very practical doctrine which is used widely even today. Empedocles also taught that the universe is composed of the forces of Neikos: Strife/Discord and Philia: Love/Friendship. Here is another source for the Manichean Two Roots in the Roman Emperor Septimius Severus who is quoting probably from the Kephalaia:

The difference between these two Principles is like that between a King and a pig: Light dwells in a royal abode in places suitable to its nature, while Dark like a pig wallows in mud and is nourished by filth and delights in it.

To be sure, preoccupation with the problem of evil did not originate with Manichaean dualism or its predecessor in Gnosticism. The Greek philosophers had long devoted considerable attention to the nature and source, of evil. In the Platonic Academy, in particular, the close links between evil and matter were emphasized as the Hellenistic world emphasized the transient and hostile nature of the natural world despite what some consider to be simply “marginal” beliefs of the world’s first “chaos magicians” (being the Gnostics) who hate and reject matter (as if any person can reject matter in the first place!). This simplistic view, however, when one researches the subject in depth can easily be dispelled since many Gnostic groups were actually involved in the great medical schools of the first and second century and had much more nuanced views on matter when one reads Gnostic texts from the Nag Hammadi Library.

Returning back to Marcion, he was a well known Gnostic in whom the Church Fathers dedicated the most vehement hatred and disgust, out of all the heretics of the ancient world. The Apostle Paul was the figurehead for his church, who during the second century was a fierce Hellenistic competitor with the Apostolic Orthodox church. Marcion once had a principle text called Antitheses.

In Adolf Harnack’s sympathetic study on Marcion in Marcion: The Gospel of the Alien God (more than Bart Ehrman’s Lost Christianities), he writes that Antitheses, was intended to be a bedrock for the Marcionite faith, indeed as a “creedal book.” A reconstruction of Antitheses is not possible, Harnack informs us, in part because “not even the arrangement of the work is clear,” but a number of things can nonetheless be determined or gleaned based upon quotes from it found in the works of the church fathers. The purpose for this book was to “demonstrate the irreconcilability of the Old Testament with the gospel,” along with the latter’s origin from a different God (p. 17).

We also know its opening lines: “O wonder upon wonder! Rapture, power, amazement! We can say nothing about the gospel message, not even compare it with anything else.” Here, Christ was saying that Christ came from another realm altogether with a wondrous message of deliverance in ecstatic terms. Moreover there seems to have been a special emphasis on one word in particular—“new.” We can find references to “new God,” “new deity,” “the new kingdom,” “new and unheard of kingdom,” “new master and proprietor of the elements,” “novel doctrines of the new Christ,” “new works of Christ,” “new miracle,” etc, etc, as opposed to the old wine skin of the Old Testament.

It looks like Marcion was struck with astonishment, bowed down in awe before a revelation so utterly prodigious of the Gospel. Clement of Alexandria felt equally exalted:

Christ shines. He shines more brightly than the sun. Night flees before him, fire is afraid, death departs. He presents the believing soul to the Father to keep in heaven for all eternity. O true sacred mystery! O clear, pure light!”

Marcion referred to this “new,” supreme God as “the Stranger.” The Marcionites also could call themselves “strangers,” much like other Gnostics did as not a pejorative term but an endearing one, as they proclaimed a strange or foreign gnosis or knowledge, a term that reveals some of their philosophy of existence.

The Latin Church Father Tertullian accused Marcion of deism (then called Epicureanism, since Epicurus the philosopher was technically a deist) in Against Marcion 1.24.

If (Marcion) chose to take any one of the school of Epicurus, and entitle him God in the name of Christ, on the ground that what is happy and incorruptible can bring no trouble either on itself or anything else (for Marcion, while poring over this opinion of the divine indifference, has removed from him all the severity and energy of the judicial character), it was his duty to have developed his conceptions into some imperturbable and listless god…

But (once for all) let Marcion know that the principle term of his creed comes from the school of Epicurus, implying that the Lord is stupid and indifferent; wherefore he refuses to say that He is an object to be feared.

Tertullian also makes fun of the idea of there being a “new God,” exposing his hopeless rhetoric and red-hot Catholic love for the Old Testament (1.8).

In the first place, how arrogantly do the Marcionites build up their stupid system, bringing forward a new god, as if we were ashamed of the old one! So schoolboys are proud of their new shoes, but their old master beats their strutting vanity out of them.

Tertullian was comparing Marcion’s conception of god to Epicurus. Tertullian says Marcion’s metaphysical beliefs are closer to Stoicism and Platonism. The reason he accuses him of Epicureanism is that Epicurus was a deist who denied that the gods had any involvement or concern with the affairs of man. Marcion’s supreme god was similar in that he had no involvement with creation and was entirely complacent, although he did eventually intervene as Jesus Christ. Irenaeus writes in Against Heresies (V.26):

Let those persons, therefore, who blaspheme the Creator, either by openly expressed words, such as the disciples of Marcion, or by a perversion of the sense [of Scripture], as those of Valentinus and all the Gnostics falsely so called, be recognised as agents of Satan by all those who worship God; through whose agency Satan now, and not before, has been seen to speak against God, even Him who has prepared eternal fire for every kind of apostasy.

Tertullian also says something very interesting in Against Marcion (3.12):

You will find that among the Hebrews there are Christians, even Marcionites, who use the name Emmanuel when they wish to say God-with-us…

Tertullian is saying that there were Jewish Marcionites. Isn’t that kind of important, since Marcion is constantly being accused of anti-Semitism? So, let us sort this mess out. Marcion, as far as we know, had nothing against Jews. His Romans retained most of the verses sympathetic to Jews. He even felt pity for the ancient Israelites, always going so far as to blame their god, and not them, for the atrocities of the Old Testament. And he even inspired Jews themselves to convert to his religion. Yet he is accused of being an anti-Semite.

Irenaeus also posed this question to Marcion (Against Heresies 4.33.2):

…how can he be good who draws away men that do not belong to him from him who made them, and calls them into his own kingdom?

Plotinus likewise objected to the Gnostic propensity to find fault with the universe and its cause (the creator). Porphyry’s title for Plotinus’ tractate against the Gnostics is: Against those who say that the demiurge of the universe and the universe are evil. Simon Magus in the Clementine literature accuses the God of the Old Testament of creating evils, being unmerciful, not being good, and being subject to harsh passions.

The Gnostics and other similar groups believed and based their cosmological systems on the idea that various powers identified with numerous figures from Greco-Roman, Egyptian and Biblical traditions do feature in some astrological content—especially with the notion of astrological fate which early Christians and Gnostics regarded as demonic. They taught that the antithesis of belief in astrological fate was freedom of the will. Therefore, since astrological fate as a demonic power, non-Gnostic humanity was seen as being completely subservient to fate, having lost their freedom under the bondage of the law, flesh and the counterfeit spirit all orchestrated by the wicked goddess Heimarmane.

These beings were often tied with the “the authorities of the universe and the spirits of wickedness” of St. Paul’s Ephesians 6:12, which directly corresponded with the Archons of Gnosticism. These beings were also said to be the astral lords of fate and were assigned many other terms in both the Nag Hammadi Corpus and the New Testament, such as the “governors”, “guardians”, “gatekeepers”, “robbers” , “toll collectors”, “judges”, “pitiless ones”, “adulterers”, “man-eaters”, etc.

These beings will that every “star” or soul would “go astray on the way” as the Gospel of Philip puts it. Each Archon could have also been associated with a planet (no Gnostic text makes this association explicit). And each Archon, according to the Apocryphon of John, has an adjunct or ‘power’ with the head of a beast or predatory animal. Thus, the seven rulers also corresponded to the planetary spheres, the same powers that helped the Demiurge create the world and humanity. As mentioned earlier, zealous church fathers like Hippolytus confirm these accounts in the discussion of Empedocles, in which Hippolytus claimed that the much reviled arch-heretic Marcion had derived his system of dualism from in Book VII, Chapter 17 of Refutation of All Heresies. Hippolytus quotes Empedocles of saying:

Of these I also am from God a wandering exile.

Hippolytus also wrote that Empedocles taught that the first principle, being God or the ineffable Monad existed in a sublime unity before the eventual and furious “Discord” that is a chief characteristic of the Demiurge, the creator of the world and it is this “Discord” that “forcibly severs from unity, and (which it) fashions and operates upon”. Plotinus (or really Porphyry, since he is more likely the author the Enneads), the father of Neo-Platonism grumbled that the Gnostics took a pessimistic view on the world, with continual complaints against Providence and the design of the world (Enneads 2.9.8). They cite how there is a constant inequality in wealth and that passions dominate humanity rather than reason (2.9.9). Above all, the material world and all its faults are considered a consequence of the World-Soul’s fall (2.9.4).

Much like the Cynics and the Epicureans, the Gnostics disparaged the glorious celestial lights of the Planets and taught they produced “tragic dramas” and tyranny over the lives of humanity because of the cosmic spheres’ influence. This is much like the “tormentors” of the Zodiac in the Corpus Hermeticum. Their radical critique of the cosmos conflicts with the Stoic idea of the “all-pervading Logos” pan-present throughout the cosmos, the optimism of Plato’s Timaeus with the Demiurge doing his best to emulate the ideal forms, and expression of God’s glory within creation on the account in Genesis. According to Eugnostos the Blessed, the world is conceived as a cavern of chaos and oblivion because of the general lack of knowledge:

Let us, then, consider (it) this way: Everything that came from the perishable will perish, since it came from the perishable. Whatever came from imperishableness will not perish but will become imperishable, since it came from imperishableness. So, many men went astray because they had not known this difference; that is, they died.

The Gnostic perspective on the gods was very similar to Epicurus who refused to accept that the gods had anything to do with the universe, even its creation, because since the world is so evil, anything that produced it would have to be evil, too, according to him. He devised a famous argument on theodicy which goes like this: If god is wants to prevent evil, but can’t, then god is impotent. If god can prevent evil, but doesn’t, then he, too, is evil. If god doesn’t want to prevent evil and can’t prevent evil, then he is evil and impotent. But if god can prevent evil and wants to prevent evil, why does evil exist?

Plotinus, while accepted the three-fold nature (nous, psyche, matter) like any good Platonist would have; he went to great lengths to refute the Gnostic idea that the soul’s fall into matter was seen as a punishment for its audacity and sin, expiated by metempsychosis and demonic chastisement. Plotinus instead believed, much like Irenaeus, that it was good for the soul to descend into matter, to experience good and evil while the unfolding and goodness of the hierarchy of being included the physical realm. Despite Plotinus’ complaints directed against the Gnostics for their infiltration in their lecture-room, he also shared their denial for the corruptible flesh (that it could be saved) which can be traced back to Plato’s body-soul dualism: the body entombs the soul, and upon death our souls rise to the higher spirit realm of truth and perfection which also mirrors the spirit-matter dichotomy of the physical universe, by contrast, as an inferior realm that poorly copies the Forms. The Pistis Sophia explicitly compares the cosmic rulers with the planets, where the Demiurge:

…set five other great Rulers in every Aeon as lords over the 360 (Rulers), and over all the bound Rulers who are called in the whole world of mankind these names: Saturn, Mars, Mercury, Venus, Jupiter.

From these examples list above, it is easy to see that Gnosticism was a critical response to planet worship and the Fates that the planets charge. Now, what about the claim that the Gnostics beheld Jesus to be the sun? In a way, Jesus could very well be seen as the incarnation of the Sun God. However, the Apostle Paul, to which the Gnostics revered, also condemned planet worship in Galatians 4:

So also, when we were underage, we were in slavery under the elemental spiritual forces of the world. … Formerly, when you did not know God, you were slaves to those who by nature are not gods. But now that you know God—or rather are known by God —how is it that you are turning back to those weak and miserable forces? Do you wish to be enslaved by them all over again? You are observing special days and months and seasons and years! I fear for you, that somehow I have wasted my efforts on you.

Colossians 2:16-17 also says:

Therefore do not let anyone judge you by what you eat or drink, or with regard to a religious festival, a New Moon celebration or a Sabbath day. These are a shadow of the things that were to come; the reality, however, is found in Christ. Do not let anyone who delights in false humility and the worship of angels disqualify you.

Paul repeatedly condemns other religions, specifically Judaism and pagan religions, for worshiping lesser beings and planets. Christianity, like Gnosticism, was a critical reaction to planetary worship, rather than a continuation thereof. By examining his letters, Marcion’s Paul was a mystic who has visions of a disincarnate, spiritual being, who he identified with Jesus Christ. Paul was actually awaiting a docetic savior to transform his mortal body into a spiritual body and whisk him away to an immaterial heaven as indicated in 1 Corinthians 15. Paul’s Christ was a being he encountered in visions.

While there are certain varieties of doceticism and have many meanings and ideas attached to them, it is essentially the view that Jesus was in nature supremely divine, eliminating his humanity and substituting it for a seemingly one. The term Docetism (Greek, dokein = “to seem” or “to appear” and sometimes “to think” or “imagine”) indicated the distinctive thesis of it that Christ’s incarnation, hence his sufferings, were unreal, phantasmal, appearing only to be human. The Gnostics offered a vision of a non-material Christ who did not suffer and die on the cross. In fact, he was laughing at the trick he had played on all of those who thought he was dying as the Apocalypse of Peter suggests:

I saw him seemingly being seized by them. And I said “What do I see, O Lord? That it is you yourself whom they take, and that you are grasping me? Or who is this one, glad and laughing on the tree? And is it another one whose feet and hands they are striking?”

In other words: Jesus was different from what he seemed to be. Doceticism claimed that Christ only appeared or seemed to be a man. This view clearly shows the Hellenistic assumption the divine impassibility and the inherent corruptible nature of matter, although there are other variations of this doctrine. The first to mention expressly “Docetists” or “Illusionists” is Serapion of Antioch (c. 200 A.D.) in his letter to the Church at Rhossos. It was not a simple heresy on its own, but was an attitude that many of its proponents held in their own nuanced and varied ways, including Marcion, Simon Magus, Saturninus, Basilides, Cerinthus, Valentinus, Bardesanes, the authors of many Sethian texts such as the Second Treatise of the Great Seth, the Gospel of Judas, etc. This was firmly countered and opposed by the church fathers, including Irenaeus, Justin Martyr, Ignatius, Clement, Origen and especially Tertullian.

This heresy is combated by the pastorals in the New Testament, such as some parts in 2 John, some parts of the Gospel of John (which some suspect as Orthodox interpolations since its fundamental theology resembles something that is much more Hellenistic and even Gnostic), and 2 Timothy. Anti-Gnostic authorities and heresiologists such as Irenaeus would write against this docetic heresy:

“Vain indeed are those who allege that He appeared in mere seeming. For these things were not done in appearance only, but in actual reality. But if He did appear as a man, when He was not a man,” there was no “degree of truth in Him, for He was not that which He seemed to be” (AH 5.1.2; 1:527)

According to Irenaeus’ logic, when he charged the Gnostics with teaching this heresy, he claimed it was a damnable error because it left man with no hope of union with God through Jesus’ sacrifice on the Cross, or so as the Orthodox narrative goes. Irenaeus is as vigorously anti-docetic as he is anti-Gnostic. Mankind’s true salvation in the flesh was at stake through the doctrine that resurrected carnal fleshly bodies would literally fly into the sky in the clouds. Polycarp, Irenaeus’ alleged teacher and sworn enemy of Marcion, made the strongest possible charge against the Docetists by saying that “everyone who does not confess that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is an anti-Christ,” echoing 1 John 4:2-3. However, this apparently “demonic” docetic heresy can actually be traced to the Apostle Paul, as he writes in Romans 8:3:

Christ came in the likeness [i.e. appearance] of sinful flesh and condemned sin in the flesh so that the just requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us.

The logic in that passage follows a consistent theme: Flesh forces man to sin. Man cannot save himself because he has flesh. Therefore, Christ comes in the LIKENESS (Gk: homoioma, literally “appearance”) of flesh and condemns sin so that man might be relieved from the guilt of the law that he was unable to fulfill himself. If the author of that passage (Paul) had said that Christ came in actual flesh, it would destroy the entire context of the passage. Homoioma literally means “likeness” or “appearance” as a statue of a man would resemble an actual man. In other words, something that appears similar to, but not actually is, the thing that it appears to be.

Have this attitude in yourselves which was also in Christ Jesus, who, although He existed in the form of God, did not regard equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied Himself, taking the form of a bond-servant, and being made in the likeness of men. Being found in appearance as a man, He humbled Himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. Philippians 2:5-8.

Further on, in the hymn of Philippians 2:6-11, Christ descends, “bearing human likeness and the fashion of a man.” Why this oblique phraseology? The author of that passage clearly did not believe that Christ had an actual body. “Being found IN APPEARANCE AS a man.” If Paul believed that Christ was indeed a man, wouldn’t he just say so? Why would he say that Christ APPEARED to be a man? The passage presents Christ which is the Savior and Logos as being flesh. He took on flesh, he put flesh on. He wore flesh. He never BECAME or transformed into flesh. We also wear flesh. You cannot possibly be your flesh in Gnostic thought. Furthermore, in Colossians 2:9, Paul posited that Christ Jesus was the Godhead bodily who appeared in the “body” (Somatikos). A body does not automatically imply human flesh. The docetic heresy unanimously condemned by the church fathers is right in the New Testament as Paul preached the docetic Jesus, who never came to earth, and the Jewish apostles preached the human Jesus depicted in the gospels, who was a different Jesus altogether, since Paul’s Jesus is so radically different from the Jesus of the gospels. Paul himself acknowledges different Jesuses in 2 Corinthians:

For if he that cometh preacheth another Jesus, whom we have not preached, or if ye receive another spirit, which ye have not received, or another gospel, which ye have not accepted, ye might well bear with him.

In the Dialogues of Adamantius, Chapter XXVII, the Megethius (the Marcionite voice against the Catholic Adamantius i.e. Origen) hints at the “alien” or spiritual nature of Christ, sent by the Stranger God to rescue humanity from the clutches of the creator god or Demiurge, the author of the Law and the Flesh:

To such a degree was Christ an alien, to those whom he appeared, and again, Christ to the creator god, that Paul said (Gal .3:13): “Christ purchased us”. It is obvious that he was an alien, for nobody at any time purchases what is their own. But it says that those who were purchased by the alien, he desired to have as his own.

Of course, Empedocle’s doctrine of Strife and Discord can also be found in Genesis, in the fruit of knowledge of good and evil, where the primal parents Adam and Eve partook of a certain dualistic knowledge from their previous pristine, higher existence when they communed with God. From this, the fall occurred which severed the link between man and God. We can also see this dualism in Genesis, where God formed man from earth and then breathed into him the spirit of life. In other variations of this story, the Ophites claimed that Sophia was the one that really blew the spirit of life into Adam, through YHWH/Elohim. So, man is a combination of profane matter and Divine Spirit. Moreover man is the arena of an internal strife between the evil instinct (in Hebrew: Yetzer-hara) and the good instinct (Yetzer-hatov) which reflects this knowledge of good and evil. It also reflects the Platonic idea that the body is the tomb for the soul was adopted by many groups, and not just the Gnostics. In the Kabbalah, the Tikkunei Hazohar states: “A king’s [God’s] spirit is imprisoned in the tresses of the mind.”

Paul in Romans also claimed a kind of patent dualism that the later Gnostic figure-heads and schools would subscribe too and build upon in that the spirit of Truth was the prisoner of history, space and time belonging to the reality of the rulers:

I find that a law, when I would do good, evil is present with me. For I delight in the law of God after the inward man; But I see another law in my members, warring against the law of my mind, and bringing me into captivity to the law of sin, which is in my members. O wretched man that I am! Who shall deliver me from this body of death? I thank God through Jesus Christ our Lord. So then with the mind I myself serve the law of God; but with the flesh the law of sin.

This dualism is reflected in both man and the cosmos like the radical stripe of Marcion, Manes and Empedocles. Man is mortal in his body, but immortal in his divine spirit. Man is the battleground in which angels and demons duke it out. Man is the microcosm reflecting the macro-cosmos of creation. In Gnosticism, dualism was only used to emphasize the transcendental nature of God rather than the traditional Zoroastrian view that there two equal, separate forces in a constant state of struggle and warfare. And so, the Gnostics attempted to explain that evil was a consequence of this spiritual descent into matter and the mundane.

As Ray Embry writes in Marcion: Possible Progenitor of Three Famous Christian Communities: Baptists, Catholics, Gnostics, this Gnostic conception of the spiritual fall from the One still reflects a sort of Mosaic monotheism as opposed to the simple dualism of Marcion, in which he thought that there was an Unknown God superior to the inferior creator god.

All Gnostic theologies seemingly spring forth as ideological children born from the ancient Mosaic idea about an inviolable monotheism. This form of theism sees everything (no matter what) as ultimately deriving from a single Creator. Working within this rigid model of monism, the Judaistic or Mosaic theoreticians could only think in a linear or vertical fashion, where our world lies on one end, while an independent Father of Light stands on the other.

Much like how the Old Testament records this primeval struggle between the upper-light and the lower-darkness, theological tenants were also hotly debated and meted out between many Christian sects—both being of an Orthodox persuasion and a heretical one. Further evidence indicates that the original Christians were Gnostics, not literalists or fundamentalists. The Gnostics preached the Good News of Gnosis which advocated the liberation of every soul. The Orthodox Church Fathers, however, taught that the scriptures were historical and literal. “True knowledge” for Irenaeus (an attack on the Gnostic idea of salvation through knowledge) comes in the Apostolic Tradition, which comes through the succession of Bishops, which is Catholic and not sectarian:

True knowledge is [that which consists in] the doctrine of the apostles, and the ancient constitution of the Church throughout all the world, and the distinctive manifestation of the body of Christ according to the successions of the bishops, by which they have handed down that Church which exists in every place, and has come even unto us, being guarded and preserved without any forging of Scriptures, by a very complete system of doctrine...(4.33.1-9)

To Irenaeus, salvation was a more or less an ecclesiastical matter rather than an individual’s sovereign right to achieve the Great Work outside of demiurgical iron manacles of organized religion. To theologians like Irenaeus, the Gnostics were simply false prophets and schismatics. The Church Fathers along with the newly created Roman Church eventually took religious intolerance to undreamed of levels, eventually destroying all forms of religion (other than their very narrow version) that they could get there hands on as recorded in Eusebius’ Life of Constantine, 3:64, 65.

The Gnostics rivaled the emerging Catholic groups among other groups like the Jewish Christians and the Marcionites and were just as determined as their Catholic opponents to legitimize their views in any way possible. It became of utmost importance for Catholic apologists to demonstrate that Gnosticism was an erroneous doctrine of Christian heresy, and is founded or inspired by those who opposed the apostles themselves. Irenaeus taught that Simon Magus was the father of all Gnostic heresy and the Simonians of his own day claimed him as founder, just as St. Paul was the “apostle of the heretics”, as per Tertullian.

The aim of Gnosis is simple: the extraction or resurrection of the spiritual man–the spark of the “alien” Divinity imprisoned in the jail cell of spiritual death and ignorance. Any means to reach liberation and freedom from the temporal fetters of matter, from the vicissitudes of history, the turpitude of daily routines, the pain and suffering that is experienced by the less fortunate (which has always been the vast majority of the human race) to the pure transcendental good father was acceptable. Asceticism or libertinism and every variation in between was practiced. For a savior figure like Simon Magus to redeem his consort Helen, fallen into whoredom, he must roll with her in the mires of depravity. He, like Jesus, had to put on the appearance of a man, although humanity wasn’t his original nature. The Savior or Gnostic must also practice sacred deceit: He must disguise himself as an adherent to the Demiurge and the powers that rule the world, to be admitted to his domain, in order to save the souls, the sparks of Divinity, exiled and stranded as ship-wrecked sailors of ascension.

The 33° Freemasonic author Albert Pike has many fascinating things to say in his massive tome, On Morals and Dogma, especially in the following excerpt from Morals and Dogma, XXX. Knight Kodash. Pike basically admits that the Masonic lozenges or “checkerboard” symbolism so prominent in Masonic temples actually symbolizes the radical dualism proposed by Zoroaster and Mani (or Manes).

For the Johannism of the Adepts was the Kabalah of the earlier Gnostics, degenerating afterward into those heretical forms which Gnosticism developed, so that even Manes had his followers among them. Many adopted his doctrines of the two Principles, the recollection of which is perpetuated by the handle of the dagger and the tesserated pavement or floor of the Lodge, stupidly called “the Indented Tessel,” and represented by great hanging tassels, when it really means a tesserated floor (from the Latin tessera) of white and black lozenges, with a necessarily denticulated or indented border or edging. And wherever, in the higher Degrees, the two colors white and black, are in juxtaposition, the two Principles of Zoroaster and Manes are alluded to. With others the doctrine became a mystic Pantheism, descended from that of the Brahmins, and even pushed to an idolatry of Nature and hatred of every revealed dogma.

Now I am going to speaking on a personal level from here on out. I was inspired by a conversation with a friend of mine and this is what I think. Basically, what the old Hermetic alchemists were saying is that God is the only thing that’s truly real, and He’s present everywhere, or at least fragments or evidence of his existence. Under the rock and in the wood, like the Gospel of Thomas says. What we see with our senses is basically a shadow. It’s not real, in an ontological sense. This is what Benjamin Walker is getting at when he writes in Gnosticism: It’s Influence and History (p. 37):

The exercise of free will requires an area for its operation, and this resulted in certain catastrophic consequences. Where the will of the Father was withdrawn, the will of the opposing archons prevailed. Where the writ of his goodness did not run, evil emerged. Where his spirit was removed, matter came forth. Where his light was withdrawn, darkness supervened. Instead of love and providence, there was now law and fatality. And where there had been life, there was now death.

Yet it must be remembered that nothing can have existence without God, and even when God is apparently absent, his erstwhile presence has left its permanent impress. The Gospel of Truth speaks of this residual presence of God even after his withdrawal, as the footprint-trace ([ichnos) of the Father’s will. Basilides too emphasized the essential presence of God in all circumstances and situations, when he said that the empty place resulting from God’s withdrawal did not ever cease to show traces of the divine brightness. The vacated place retained the ‘flavour’ of the Father, just as a bowl containing sweet smelling unguent retains the fragrance even after the bowl has been completely emptied.

Giordarno Bruno once said that the since God is infinite, the universe must also be infinite, as God’s manifest form. I also read a recent article that some scientists now question the big bang, and think that the universe may have always been here, which if the case, Bruno was right all along. But from a theurgical perspective, which is more holistic in the view that everything is compromised of some sort of spiritual nature, and that everything in existence exists for some grand purpose. Even evil has some sort of necessary function or reason for being. I guess I’ve been influenced by Hermetic monism.

I’m choosing to look at it this way because radical dualism has become highly disturbing to me as of late. The thought that evil exists as some counter deity and functions independently with no intended purpose from the good is a very grim prospect. I have to believe there is a reason for everything now. The science fiction author Philip K. Dick had the same issue. At times, he would be a radical dualist, but then it would become so disturbing to him that he would adopt a more monistic worldview. The Hypostasis of the Archons sort of reflects this more monistic (in its own contradictory pluralistic sense) way of looking at things.

The rulers laid plans and said, “Come, let us create a man that will be soil from the earth.” They modeled their creature as one wholly of the earth. Now the rulers […] body […] they have […] female […] is […] with the face of a beast. They had taken some soil from the earth and modeled their man after their body and after the image of God that had appeared to them in the waters. They said, “Come, let us lay hold of it by means of the form that we have modeled, so that it may see its male counterpart […], and we may seize it with the form that we have modeled” – not understanding the force of God, because of their powerlessness. And he breathed into his face; and the man came to have a soul (and remained) upon the ground many days. But they could not make him arise because of their powerlessness. Like storm winds they persisted (in blowing), that they might try to capture that image, which had appeared to them in the waters. And they did not know the identity of its power. Now all these things came to pass by the will of the father of the entirety.

And again it says:

Now when Yaldabaoth saw him (Sabaoth) in this great splendor and at this height, he envied him; and the envy became an androgynous product, and this was the origin of envy. And envy engendered death; and death engendered his offspring and gave each of them charge of its heaven; and all the heavens of chaos became full of their multitudes. But it was by the will of the father of the entirety that they all came into being – after the pattern of all the things above – so that the sum of chaos might be attained.

So from the Sethian perspective, even the demiurge and the archons were created for a reason which accounts for a more nuanced Hermetic view that isn’t as dualistic as many consider Gnosticism to be. Both radical dualism and radical monism can be taken to extreme conclusions. The more moderate approach of the Sethians and the Hermetists is the most rational, out of these perspectives. And yet, radical and moderate dualism are just two different ways of looking at the same thing. Both are true and compatible with one another. It just depends on whether you’re going to focus on the light or the dark. New Agers represent the radical monism worldview. They’re so hyper-focused on the positive that they totally reject the influence of evil in the world and are thus totally exposed to demonic influence and deception. It’s like these New Agers who channel random spirits and believe all the wacky BS that comes along with their messages about our beloved space brothers, aliens, ascension into the fourth dimension and such.

There is a good part in the novel, A Scanner Darkly where Philip K Dick muses on radical and moderate dualism. He writes as Bob Arctor about how he suspects that radical dualism may be true, but he hopes that it isn’t.

“What does a scanner see? Into the head? Down into the heart? Does it see into me? Into us? Clearly or darkly? I hope it sees clearly because I can’t any longer see into myself. I see only murk. I hope for everyone’s sake the scanners do better, because if the scanner sees only darkly the way I do, then I’m cursed and cursed again.”

I see the devil as a sort of tool of God. He’s evil and in rebellion, but God secretly uses him to do his will. Kind of how the Valentinians saw the demiurge as well as the Ophites with Sophia and Ialdabaoth. Holism is inherent to natural and sympathetic magic. Tantra also encompasses holism as well. Everything in nature exists for some specific purpose and is imbued with a spiritual nature that can be tapped into through occult knowledge. The Gospel of Philip tells us this exactly:

“The saints are served by evil powers, for they are blinded by the Holy Spirit into thinking that they are serving an (ordinary) man whenever they do so for the saints. Because of this, a disciple asked the Lord one day for something of this world. He said to him, ‘Ask your mother, and she will give you of the things which are another’s.'”

So what we call the Devil and his legions of demons from hell would be the anarchists of the cosmic hierarchy. They’re chaotic and in rebellion to God’s will, but God’s providential scheme already accounted for the faults of free will before it was even enacted. Or maybe Empedocles and Marcion were right along to say that there were two opposing principles from the beginning of creation or that this dualism is somehow an aberration or deviation from an original unity of existence. At this point, I am open to any of these possibilities.

—

Addendum – As it turns out, Hippolytus in Refutation (Book VI. 6), also claims that Simon Magus is heavily inspired by Empedocles. Marcion is simply continuing in Simon’s tradition through the guise of Paul:

Simon denominates in the Great Announcement a perfect intelligible (entity), after such a mode, that each of those things which, existing indefinitely, may be infinitely comprehended, both speaks, and understands, and acts in such a manner as Empedocles speaks of:—

For earth, indeed, by earth we see, and water by water,
And air divine by air, and fire fierce by fire,
And love by love, and also strife by gloomy strife.

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