Gnosticism & Gnosis
Pleroma — Lord — Being.
in traditional Religions (Isdaism-Christianity-Islam), the Pentateuch of Moses and his story from God are recognized as God creating the world and the first man. but Gnosticism is different, and this difference can be seen in the Question…
The world is God’s mistake.
Genesis 6:6–13. “And the Lord repented that he had created man on the earth, and was grieved in His heart. And the Lord said: I will destroy from the face of the earth man whom I have created,…”
Genesis, Chapter 1, verse 31. “And God saw everything that He had made, and, behold, it was very good. And there was evening, and there was morning: the sixth day.”
“it turns out that in the first Created World there were elements of Lack, Error, inferiority-failure of God himself — this means that “not good”, as in Genesis, verse 31, but with a flaw-error — which means God is Imperfect, since the first time he did not could create nothing perfectly\ God knew that Satan and demons and even Adam and Eve would betray and fall… Then since God was mistaken, then God is Imperfect, which means the World is Imperfect, which means all the Scriptures are Imperfect and the Prophets are imperfect.
Pleroma — Genesis of the Gnostics.
Pleroma is translated as — Completeness and harmony.
Together with the divine-feminine principle of “Thoughts”.
The true God does not create, but rather immanates, i.e., the flow of things comes from him.
…and the one who creates, and the one who said let there be light??
those. instead of saying let there be light like the god of the old light… the true god releases light from himself in the likeness of breathing, he does not create it on purpose, the light just pours out. Everything came from light and everything will return to it.
-Due to the fact that the Pleroma emits Light — led to the creation of a number of divine figures called “ions”.
The Central Idea is that subsequent Emmanations became smaller and smaller. (like circles on water that diverge from a thrown stone).
Sophia (wisdom-god), was the youngest of the Aeons, so she turned out to be the farthest from God, (eons are born because light loses its power). She is on the edge, so her Great Desire for Sophia is for more light, …. but alas, it was the desire to get closer to God that gave birth to her own emmanation, the unknown part of her husband of the Murgian sex — this eons make up a couple.
Sophia moved towards God and destroyed the balance.
This immanation produced dark chaos, a crack in the pleroma which would later become matter, but at this stage it initially represented a lifeless place, boundless darkness.
- because of Sophia’s love for God, darkness was created.
- Sofia, oppressed by darkness, decided to create a creature to rule this place. (Sofia wanted the darkness to be dispelled). And Sophia breathed life into the creature Mandrogin, the lion-headed entity Ilda Baofa, which means the parent of divine forces, the child god. The Gnostics have Ilda Baoth as a stupid, ignorant child who does not listen to her own mother. Ilda Baoth will call himself Dimiurge. And he will say, “There is no God but me.” — only occupiers say that.
Sophia tries to explain to him that more powerful forces exist, but he does not listen to her and begins to create heaven and earth, from materia which becomes the main Archon. (chief, ruler, head; beginning, power) — the highest official in the ancient Greek city-states (city-states).
- from the creations of Dimiurge there were other Archons, each began to control one of the 7 heavens created specifically for them. they all exist below the level of Sophia, which arrives in the 8th heaven.
-The most distant region from Dimiurge, so distant that he can hardly feel it, belongs to the true God.
Each planet is ruled by an Archon.
- well, people order a horoscope to find out their destiny, and who rules destiny — the Archons. (because they rule over the planets).
- Dimiurge proclaimed that “There is no god except me,” when Sophia heard this, she told him, “You are mistaken Samoel — per Samoel is translated as “blind god.”
The Dimiurge is a stupid child, the mother does not listen, and the mother is divine wisdom — but because of love, she accidentally created divine chaos.
The Dimiurge occupies space and time, he deifies matter, he makes an agreement with the Peoples so that they worship him “One God,” the peoples must recognize the Dimiurge and repeat “There is one God and there is no God besides Him.”
“But everything is remembered and the plans of the Dimiurge will be shaken when the Messiah comes — Jesus Christ — Truth in the flesh — the incarnation of the true God of the pure Pleroma”.
Gnosticism & Gnosis
Gnosticism (from the Greek γνωδτικόζ — cognizing) (gnostics, gnosis, or gnosis), this is the name of a set of religious-philosophical (theosophical) systems that appeared during the first two centuries of our era and in which the basic facts and teachings of Christianity, divorced from their historical soil, developed in the sense of pagan (both Eastern and Hellenic) wisdom. It differs from related phenomena of religious and philosophical syncretism, such as Neoplatonism, Hermeticism, and Gnosticism by the recognition of Christian data, and from real Christianity by the pagan understanding and processing of these data and a negative attitude towards the historical roots of Christianity in the Jewish religion. In this last respect, Gnosticism stands in particularly sharp contrast to the Judaizing sects in Christianity, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, to Kabbalah, which represents the pagan processing of specifically Jewish religious data.
Eschatology of Gnosticism — The teaching of Gnostic systems about the ultimate fate of the world assumes the idea of history as a linear process with a definite beginning and end. The meaning of the story is the gradual replenishment of the lack of Plyroma in the process of returning its particles scattered in the material world. With the return of the last particle worthy of returning to Pleroma, and the elimination of the mixture of light and darkness that arose as a result of the creation of the world, history loses its meaning, and the end of the created world comes. Thus, the latest events represent the final separation of the kingdom of light from the material world of evil and darkness.
Gnostics accepted the biblical thesis that the world was created by one god. and this marked a radical break with the pagan world. but damn, there were no Christians then, most likely they encountered sectarian Jews. plus Hermes. Trismegistus. (Greek gods are projections of human qualities and their ultimate in the human imagination. the ultimate of courage-beauty, etc.). 1. the first fundamental Gnostic conclusion. The Gnostics make more abstraction, but then the Gnostics conclude “precisely because the world is given as it is and the world was created by God, this means that God is an asshole. The world as it is does not characterize God very well. 2. the created world. it consists of matter and matter is something low. the world is a prison in which the human spirit is imprisoned, which is not from this world. and this alienated spirit is extremely uncomfortable in the material world because nothing serves him with it. (this is taken from … “your complexity of individual thinking crushed by the complexity of this universal order (imperial universalism), it turns out that people are unable to find a source for a meaningful life. This creates objective depression in such a world; living in such a world is psychologically uncomfortable.
Gnosticism: its nature and historical roots.
Definition of Gnosticism as a set of diverse religious-mystical and philosophical-religious movements characteristic of the Middle East and the Mediterranean in the 1st-3rd centuries. AD and arose at the intersection of the influences of Judaism, Hellenistic syncretism, Zoroastrianism and emerging Christianity, does not speak in any way about its essence. Gnosticism, in our opinion, cannot be reduced to any of the influential understandings of this complex phenomenon in modern science — namely, to its interpretation as one of the manifestations of late antique syncretism, or as a “sectarian periphery of Christianity,” or as a fact of “mass culture.” “, based on the so-called “secondary mythologization”. We are not allowed to limit ourselves to the listed points of view not only by the extraordinary complexity of the subject under consideration, but also by the presence of undoubted internal, essential similarities among a variety of Gnostic movements.
It is obvious that behind the Gnostic concepts there was a certain attitude of consciousness, which was intricately refracted in the motley syncretism of the first centuries after the birth of Christ. It is clarified by several archetypal patterns observed in the teachings of that era. First of all, this is the conviction of the presence of an internal, absolute principle, invisibly present in a person, “unexistent” and unknown to his “empirical Self”, which knows only the juxtaposed unity of soul and body (internal and external, earth and heaven, divine and human), however, revealed (arising and growing) in the human heart thanks to the miracle of revelation. Secondly, the identity of this “incomparable self” of man (“pneuma”, “seal”, “trace”, “true mind”, “spark”, etc.) with the True God, equally transcendental in relation to the world, as well as the inner beginning of a person — his empirical “I”. This identity is understood as something direct and, of course, immediate, independent of the givens of the body (soul) and the external world. Thus, the historical and cosmological aspects of traditional (pre-Gnostic) consciousness lose significance, because history (in the form in which historical duration was perceived by ancient culture) and Cosmos turn into something external and insignificant for the highest identity. However, at the same time, the question arises about explaining the difference between external and internal, that is, about explaining the existence of a world alienated from the Divine, on the one hand, and on the other, the reasons for the “sleep of oblivion” in which the absolute in man remained until the moment of revelation. In the famous “Extract from Theodotus” this question takes the existential form of the experience of abandonment and concern for one’s fate.
Gnostic-oriented consciousness solves this problem, again, based on the initial identity: the creation of the world is, at the same time, the beginning of the “sleep of oblivion,” and vice versa. Since the creation of the world is the central event for the Gnostic understanding of ejection, the main form of revelation becomes cosmogony (closely intertwined with the prayer of the Gnostic prophet in the ascent to the Divinity, as if repeating the cosmogonic event).
The actual creation of the sensory Cosmos is preceded by the emergence of the so-called. “Pleroma”, the Fullness of being — knowledge of a special, genuine world, which is self-knowledge of the transcendental Divinity. The pleroma is usually “composed” of individual beings (“eons”), which personify the predicates (names) of God, being a kind of embodiment of the apophatic procedure, that is, the procedure of such glorification of the Divine, when it is affirmed as superior to any name (predicate). Therefore, beings-eons are “lower” than their Father, but at the same time, as His Names constitute absolute self-knowledge (actually “gnosis”) of the Divine and the highest existential reality.
The creation of the Pleroma, which in various Gnostic teachings can be depicted as a “coming out”, and as a “calling out”, and as an “emanation”, and as a “creation”, results in the self-will of the lower eons (“ranks”, “angels” or etc. .p.), which turns into the appearance of a sensory-corporeal Cosmos, alienation, “sleep of oblivion” and evil. We see that on the question of the origin of evil, the Gnostics adhere not to the concept of dual coexistence of the Good and Evil Absolutes, but to a monodualistic scheme. Monodualism is the idea that the second, lower, principle is “allowed” into existence by the First, higher. It (the second) is generated, but has originality, its own will and responsibility, and therefore is capable of falling away from the First. Let us note that not only gnosis, but also late antique consciousness as a whole clearly senses the defectiveness that the imperfection and lack of free will of the Second would introduce into the creative potential of the First. Generation is not self-continuation — therefore the Second is capable of opposition to its Father (which does not detract from the perfection of the Parent, making it, on the contrary, even more complete).
Falling away, according to Gnostic beliefs, is caused by incomplete knowledge. So, Sophia — in the Valentinian school — is the last of the eons, ontologically distant from the Father; in the teachings of Simon the Magician, the lower “Powers” fall into sin, not knowing at all about the creator; in the concept of Basilides, the Great Archon and the Archon of the Hebdomad exist in a world separated from the “Non-existent Father” by the Holy Spirit, etc. However, ignorance (a-gnosia as a fundamental characteristic of the world opposite the Pleroma) is not the exhaustive cause of falling away, for its reverse side is the desire for self-affirmation, to embrace all things with its imperious power.
Self-affirmation leads to the appearance of incompleteness: the sinner moves away from the Pleroma to a place where he exercises his self-will far from the Father. This place in Gnosticism is interpreted as chaotic matter (“wet nature”, “foggy abyss”), and the question of whether the latter originally coexisted with God or was a negative result of sinful self-will (became a “shadow” from the actions of fallen forces, the embodiment of their low emotions — horror, lust, anger), Gnostics give vague answers.
In addition, the Gnostics call Christ an aeon. Eons are eternal particles through which intelligible reality is, as it were, transmitted in our world: the reality of ideas. There are also a certain number of them. But each aeon also has a likeness that they emit. The last eon is called the Gnostics of Christ.
Gnostics are revolutionaries in the field of consciousness, rejected for their position by the official church.
The Gnostics at one time made a real revolution in the consciousness of people, they offered to look at the world in a completely new way, with a freer and more open view. Gnosticism is a doctrine that the church tried to eradicate even mention of. It was objectionable to the powers that be.
What is so amazing and revolutionary in the teachings of the Gnostics?
1) Rethinking the figure of God. It is recognized that God, who created the earthly world, may be imperfect and bad. And this is a very big step forward for the Ancient World. Because then the majority of people’s consciousness was euphemistic. People were afraid of a world that was incomprehensible to them, and softened some phenomena for themselves, resigning themselves to the injustice of the surrounding reality. And even openly tyrannical and unjust deities were called great and merciful. Thus, they tried to reassure themselves, to convince themselves that supposedly all the ugliness that they see (slavery, dictatorship, lawlessness, religious oppression) is normal, this is part of the world order.
The Gnostics declare the right of man to openly call good good and evil evil. To do without obsequious service to cruel deities that people themselves have created, and to admit that there is no justice in the world.
2) Individualization of consciousness. The Gnostics realized that the laws of the world are ruthless and blind. But what then is the real meaning? That’s right, the individual consciousness of a person. The person himself with his ideas, revelations, and insights becomes important. The individual “I” is affirmed, free from collective dogmas. In the Ancient World, such an approach seemed unthinkable. After all, for the priests, a person was part of a certain group or association — a clan, class, tribe, state, religious structure. Oleg Telemsky, the creator and leader of the Castalia club, which aims to educate people psychologically and in the field of esotericism, argues that in Gnosticism, the personal experience of the individual “I” that establishes a connection with the Pleroma is of particular importance. And what symbols the Pleroma appears in seems secondary.
2) Belief in the special capabilities of man. And not just high abilities, but an exceptional divine spark in a person, thanks to which… a person himself can rise to the level of God and become him. The Gnostics were not afraid to identify man with God. They recognized the truly divine potential in man. Gnosticism is a concept in which belief in god-men is present and recognized. When a person has come to know God, he overcomes the hardships of the earthly world and its limits and becomes God himself, and God becomes him. Divine energy flows into a person. And what does this give him? Spiritual immortality and inexhaustible possibilities to create miracles.
Gnostic teaching was very free in its essence, and therefore inconvenient for the church, which, as it moved closer to power, increasingly became the antonym of freedom
Jaldabaoth, the creator of this world, is cruel, stupid and vindictive, but a person who has acquired gnosis has the opportunity to become superior to this limited and imperfect creator of the earthly world.
3) The idea of psychological integrity. In Gnosticism it is given as the ideal of a person who does not fawn over either God or rulers, but is internally harmonious and true to his convictions.
4) Absence of the “it was better before” attitude. In the ideas of the Gnostics there is no reverence for past eras. There is no time in human history that a Gnostic would call a golden age. Gnostics believe that it is worth not “emulating the lives of our ancestors,” but, on the contrary, moving forward and developing spiritually. If orthodox believers consider paradise to be an ideal place lost to humanity, then a gnostically inclined person considers Eden to be a matrix where people were in a state of unconsciousness. The Gnostic sees a chance for salvation only ahead.
5) Critical attitude towards the official church. I have already written that the Gnostics rejected the church structure. It is worth noting that they not only rejected it, but also had the courage to independently interpret what was written in the sacred books. Gnostics gathered in communities at their meetings, where they discussed philosophical issues. Ggnostics were very active in debates on theosophical, theological, and philosophical topics. All community members could freely speak out about issues that concern them. Everyone was accepted into Gnostic communities, regardless of condition, gender, age and even religion. The main thing for Gnostics is that a person should be highly spiritual and strive to find the truth. And the Gnostics did not need the church in its official understanding. After all, they came into contact with the Divine themselves and believed in reaching the state of Divinity.
Gnosticism and the imperfection of the World. The world is like God’s mistake.
The Gnostic concept that God is the basis of Gnosticism. This concept takes its roots from the Bible, (Torah), in the Book of Moses “Genesis 6:7” And the Lord said: “I will wipe out the human race that I have created from the face of the earth. I will destroy men, and animals, and creeping things, and the birds of the air, because I regret that I created them.”
How was Satan tempted, and how did the Serpent also decide to subdue Eve and Adam, if God created everything well?
“Genesis, Chapter 1, verse 31”. And God saw everything that He had created, and behold, it was very good. And there was evening and there was morning: the sixth day.
- From the point of view of Gnosticism, God could not create an ideal world and made a mistake and repented to himself — he realized his mistake and decided to correct it before it was too late, but it was already too late.
So it turns out that in the first created world there were elements of deficiency, or even evil, — this means that it is not good but with a flaw, which means God is imperfect since the idiot was not able to create anything perfectly in the paradise world the first time. God knew that Satan and the demons would betray and fall and then go to eternal torment. How do you understand that if God is love?
God’s creations are imperfect, which means he is imperfect, which means all the prophets sent by him are imperfect, and from here it follows that all scriptures (religions) are imperfect. Even the man himself is obviously a failed project. — But the imperfection of the World begins with self-improvement — the path to Gnosis.
Matter, shaped by the fallen generation of the Father, becomes a sensual Cosmos, that is, being, where everything is divided by the conditions of space and time, where there is no symphonic (conciliar) integrity of the Pleroma, where all relationships have an external, alienated character. The reason for this lies in the fact that the activity of the Demiurge of the sensory Cosmos is a duplication, a parody of the creative act of the Father. For the latter, there is no matter as an external condition of creation, while the Demiurge is initially limited by the secondary nature of his activity, the presence of matter and the lack of internal fullness of will (it is restless, driven by pride, conceit, ignorance, it turns out to be unfree).
However, even in the lower, fallen being there is a higher principle. It is captivated by the material world — just as the Demiurge was captivated by his pride. The experience of this sinful fall, fragmentation, self-alienation, loss of freedom constitutes one of the central moments of shock, which is reported by all Gnostic authors who are confident that they have received revelation. The fate of a person is connected with the event of cosmic creation; he is a bearer of responsibility and a witness of the “fall”. The fall predetermines the non-existence of the inner principle in a person for his empirical, attached to the sensory-bodily “I”.
However, the emergence of a human being is a complex and ambiguous process in Gnostic cosmogonies. Usually it is a manifestation of the forces that make up the Pleroma before the rulers of the sensory Cosmos. The reason for these manifestations is the desire of the higher spheres to defeat evil, to save the fallen light potencies, “replenishing” the incompleteness. The Sky Man is one such manifestation. In his image (light, literally visible), the rulers of the sensory world create a bodily person. The combination of both is the human race. Moreover, the warring parties view it as a weapon in the fight against the enemy. Both efforts — the saving Good and the resisting evil — are co-present in a human being, creating the unique architecture of his self-awareness and destiny. However, in the overwhelming majority of people, the bodily-empirical prevails over the “heavenly”. This raises the question of how non-existent inner potency can be initiated. The only tool for initiation is Revelation, according to the Gnostics. The entire existence of the lower, sensory Cosmos is filled with the beneficial activity of the Pleroma, which opens man’s eyes to his fundamental identity with the Absolute. Being a “temptation and madness” for an empirical person (for it is addressed to the transcendental last beginning), it causes a powerful response explosion of the “absolute I”, in one indivisible instant comprehending the appearance, non-substantiality of diverse external being, its direct involvement in the appearance of the lower world, as well as the coming universal return to the unity of the Pleroma.
The bearers of revelation among the Gnostics are the characters of the Jewish, Hellenic, Iranian, Egyptian traditions, borrowed from the sacred books of various cultures, as well as such “abstractions” as the ontologized components of man — “Mind”, “Spirit”, etc. The bearers of revelation can also be completely historical persons such as Christ, his family, the apostles, or the founders of numerous Gnostic sects. In any case, each of the bearers of Revelation is just a hypostasis of the Completeness, the identity that lies behind all external differences. Therefore, some of the Gnostics (Simon, Menander) directly called themselves “The Highest Gods,” emphasizing the randomness and insignificance of their current state.
Space and historical duration cease to be natural realities for humans, as well as sacred traditions in their traditional, familiar reading. All this — in its external appearance — is the fruit of the activity of the evil (or mistaken Demiurge), behind all this it is necessary to see the reality of the Pleroma parodied by God of “this world”, the struggle of Revelation and the inert resistance of the material rulers, the encrypted, hidden meaning.
The condition for salvation is ultimately death. This is especially evident in those Gnostic teachings that use language close to Christianity. For them, the death of Christ on the cross, which turns into an absolute victory over death, is not only the path of individual salvation, but also a model according to which the rapid metamorphosis of the world will take place. The vast majority of Gnostic religious teachers believed that the sensory-corporeal world should be destroyed, and “this place will disappear.” If the existence of a certain “residue” from the previous material existence was assumed, persisting even after the Last Judgment, then it was understood as a being that was no longer opposed to the Pleroma (in the Valentinian system, for example, this is the “eternal kingdom of Christ”, the place of residence of “spiritual beings” : after the death of the “material” and the ascension to the Father of the “pneumatic”).
The eschatological attitude of the Gnostics is undeniable. But it is equally certain that the attitude of consciousness, coming from the identity of the inner man with the Absolute, is less interested in the End of the World than in the metamorphosis of the individual being. Thus, changes occurring in one are equal to changes in the All. Consequently, gnosis is not concerned with the search for a truly universally valid language and the creation of new traditions. Both are not significant in the eyes of a person who discovers the abyss of light within himself and understands how far empirical existence is from the fullness of light. This is what caused the multiplicity of Gnostic communities, the constant splintering of new cells from them, the absence of attempts to reduce the Gnostic teaching to something holistic, right up to the age of Mani. However, Manichaeism is only genetically connected with gnosis, essentially being a religious teaching of a different type.
Who do the Gnostics think Jesus is? — A spiritual teacher who mentally liberates humanity!
Did the Gnostics believe in a special mission of Jesus? Yes, but this mission in their minds was different from the one presented by the official church.
“The fact that Christ only appears to be a man contradicts the foundations of Christianity, because Christ is 100% Man and 100% God. He is God incarnate.”
If the church (both Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant churches) believe that Jesus was sent to Earth by God the Father to atone for the sins of mankind, and in particular original sin, then according to the Gnostics, Jesus came to give people the real Knowledge — Gnosis. This Knowledge is about the principles of the Universe and the nature of man himself and his soul and spirit. The world naturally divided into three layers, in much the same way as it happens in liquid media: the light spiritual part immediately ascended to the Creator, the heavier spiritual part followed it with difficulty, and the most massive material one settled at the bottom, slammed down like a tombstone. Heavenly Firmament. Here, in inert and spiritless darkness, which knew nothing about the bright world, the creator-archons lived, creating the earth and people and sincerely considering themselves the highest gods.
The world tragedy was that some particles of heavenly essence got stuck in the darkness of materiality and were captured. This luminous part has always lived in spiritual people, for whom it was cramped and difficult in the rough material shell. It was them that Jesus came to free, the messenger of the upper world, who would ultimately collect all the particles of light and spirit and return them back to the Creator. And the material world, no longer disturbed by anything spiritual and forever forgetting about its existence, will be able to safely and complacently remain in its darkness.
The Gnostics believed that Jesus was a supermundane Spirit who descended to Earth, who put on a bodily shell, that is, he only took on the appearance of a person, but is not truly one. And what is characteristic is that this spirit can then enter the bodies of the Gnostics themselves, that is, enlightened people who have acquired the Highest Knowledge.
And what is characteristic is that this spirit can then enter the bodies of the Gnostics themselves, that is, enlightened people who have acquired the Highest Knowledge. A person transformed in spirit and consciousness in the Gnostic concept merges with God and… he himself becomes God, and God becomes a Gnostic. Divine energy flows into a person. And what does this give him? True spiritual immortality.
The sleeping human spirit is awakened by the call of the ultimate Divinity or by messengers of Light. Such messengers have been sent by the True God throughout history. They descend from higher spiritual realities to awaken souls to return.
Jesus in the Gnostic understanding is one of these messengers of Heaven.
The value of the teachings of Jesus, according to the Gnostics, is that he addresses his statements both to the human mind, consciousness, and subconscious of people, and at the same time, to gnosis, which nests in the depths of the human soul and which is born there. With his words, Jesus motivates people to reveal their personal creative abilities, which are in a person, but are often hidden from him.
Jesus is not just a man — Jesus is God! God in the human body, Jesus and Pleroma in man — Unconditional Love — God is love. Nobody in the human world needs love, people killed God for this. But God forgave them when they idiots killed him. Jesus forgave everyone. Jesus showed the way to all mankind. “God is love”.
Of course, there are other types of Gnostics who do not recognize Jesus — this is the dark Logos, which gives rise to Atheism — the darkness of the Demiurge.
The hopelessness of the created world. Why did the ouroboros become a Gnostic symbol of evil?
Is it possible to escape from a world filled with evil? You have to try, but on this path you will have to face a great dragon that bites its tail and embraces the whole world, wrote the authors of ancient Gnostic treatises. Ouroboros became for the mystics of Gnosticism a symbol of the power that connects the human spirit with his soul and body and does not allow him to leave the world created by a stupid and powerless Creator. Philosopher and religious scholar Dmitry Uzlaner tried to give the Gnostic image of the Ouroboros a universal meaning — “The Knife” publishes a fragment of his text “The Broken “Wheel of Life”: An Essay on Ouroboros”, the full version of which can be read in the issue of the Logos magazine dedicated to institutional philosophy.
The meaning of ouroboros “embraces all cyclic systems (unity, plurality and return to unity; evolution and involution; birth, growth, decline, death, etc.).” These are the life cycles of “both the universe and each individual being: the cyclical dance of nature in the endless process of creation and destruction.”
As Plato writes, who gave a detailed description of ouroboros in the Timaeus, the demiurge created the Cosmos in such a way as to “revolve uniformly in the same place, in itself, making circle after circle.”
Ouroboros is an “immanent frame” that is so appealing to supporters of a secular worldview and admirers of the natural scientific picture of the world. It follows logically from the previous one that the universal cycle is closed on itself and self-sufficient.
Ouroboros embodies the image of “self-fertilization or the primitive idea of a self-sufficient Nature — a nature that, à la Nietzsche, constantly returns within a cyclical pattern to its own beginning.”
“…he did not need any organ through which he would take in food or throw back already digested food: nothing went beyond his limits and did not enter him from anywhere, for there was nothing to enter. [The body of the cosmos] was skillfully constructed in such a way as to receive food from its own decay and carry out all its actions and states in itself and through itself. For he who built it found that to be self-sufficient is much better than to be in need of anything.”
In the diagram we see three dimensions: the Leviathan-girdled largest part in the center (lower universe), the intermediate dimension and, finally, the highest sphere. Since we are interested in the question of enslavement, let us focus on the diagram of the lower universe, making two amendments to it.
First, the dragon Leviathan and Beemoth appear to be a single entity, or two parts of a single entity, with Leviathan being the feminine (“the soul of all things,” as Origen put it) and Behemoth the masculine. Their battle, described in the Book of Job, is similar to the clash of masculine and feminine principles. That is, it is a gigantic being, embracing the entire Cosmos, as Origen clearly indicates when he reports that “the creator of this accursed diagram inscribed Leviathan both in the circle of this diagram and in its center, thus placing his name in two different places.” .
Leviathan is the outer ring that frames the Universe, and at the same time its inner contour.
Secondly, following one of the interpreters, we would place the lines of Tartarus/Gehenna not inside the earth, but above Leviathan, in the form of that very “barrier of evil” that separates the lower eon from the higher spiritual eons. This solution fits better with the text of Origen himself (“the diagram was “divided by a thick black line, and this line, according to him, was called Gehenna, that is, Tartarus”), and in addition, it better corresponds to the Gnostic worldview: why place hell underground , if the Universe itself is hell? As Rudolf writes, in Gnosticism “the sphere of the anti-divine dimension is very greatly expanded: it extends even into the visible heavens and includes the world and the rulers who hold it in bondage, in particular the creator of the world with his auxiliary troops, the planets and the signs of the zodiac.”
In the center of the Universe we see the Earth, surrounded by concentric circles, which depict the seven planets known in antiquity (including the Moon and the Sun). These seven planets correspond to seven “archons” led by Jaldabaoth, identified with Saturn. Extremely important for our analysis, the word “archon” (Old Greek ἄρχων — “chief”) in Antiquity was used to designate officials, officials, high-ranking nobles, and in Christian-Gnostic texts — authorities of all kinds, from earthly bureaucrats to spiritual beings, controlling the sector of the universe assigned to them. Finally, the ouroboros, which is called Leviathan, that is, “dragon” in Hebrew, surrounds the entire earthly universe, and surrounds both from the outside and from the inside. Thus, this Universe can be represented as a giant dragon with seven heads (according to the number of planets/archons).
The identification of ouroboros with Leviathan caused particular bewilderment in Origen: why is “this leviathan, which is so clearly belittled by the author of the Psalms,” called “the soul that passes through all things”*? Why does ouroboros become a symbol of Satan, evil, whose head the Lord “crushed in the psalms… gave him as food to the people of the desert,” who rises in the “Revelation of John the Theologian” (“a beast with seven heads coming out of the sea”) to be defeated by God in the final battle?
The answer of the Gnostics is obvious: contrary to the ancient principle “The One is All,” they proclaimed the good truth that there is only a provincial eon, the periphery of light, a state house for the human spirit.
Ouroboros is not considered to be everything that exists; there is something higher than this never-ending “wheel of life.” This Cosmos is not the homeland for the actual man in man, that is, for the spirit, and his wanderings through the labyrinths of the orbit of ouroboros are not at all evening — there is a way out, there is a way upward.
Ouroboros becomes an ominous dimension precisely because it symbolizes the closing of the horizon over a person, tries to self-proclaimedly replace everything that exists, launching an endless carousel, a whirlpool in which the celios convince the subject that nothing exists except the carousel orbits imposed on him.
. know your Gnosis and ascend.
the topic of Gnosticism is very extensive, we will finish this article, but I think that there will be a continuation on the Gnostic topic… there will be a continuation
