What is Gnosticism?

[Serenitydawn]

I mean no offense to anyone, I'm just curious. Every Gnostic I have ever spoken to believed the Christian god was a demon and thought the real god was the serpent from the story of Adam and Eve. I'm getting a different impression reading through your posts. What is it you guys believe?

[SerpensCultus]

Gnosticism, though its theosophical, philosophical, theological, and metaphysical ideologies predate Christianity, is a prototypical Christian/early Christian movement. The Gnostics believed that the god of the old testament, the Judaic god, was a tyrant demiurge, a false creator, who was accidentally conceived by a being known as Sophia, who is equated with Lucifer and is an emanation, or aeon, of the hidden acosmic unmanifest from which all truly originates from, Monad. Sophia/Lucifer came to man in the garden of Eden to teach to him true knowledge and power, what would be called Pleroma, the totality of the powers of Monad and a paradise for his emanations/aeons, and when Yaldaboath, the Gnostic name for the Judaic god of the old testament, saw this, he realized man could easily usurp him, so he cast him out of paradise. In the Kabbalah, this could be seen as being cast from the highest sphere and down into the lowest sphere. There is speculation, however, whether or not that the Qliphoth would be a more attractive system to use, as the Kabbalah is seen as the pathway to who the Gnostics would call Yaldaboath, while the Qliphoth would be to transcend him, especially when the Qliphoth is seen as the tree of knowledge the serpent tempted Eve and Adam to eat from, who the Gnostics revere as the true, hidden god, an aeon of Monad, as well as the true creator of humanity, as it was Yaldaboath, the demiurge, who trapped Sophia in the world of flesh to use her as the power to animate the clay that he used to make humans from.

What I have described summarizes what the Gnostic sect of the Ophites believed, give or take the Kabbalah/Qliphoth interpretation. There are many Gnostic sects, so many that it is hard to delve into, but this is the jist of it.

Gnosticism itself, however, draws a lot from Greek philosophers, especially Plato. if you trace back these acosmic ideas they had back far enough, you could probably find them in religions such as Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, and so on and so forth.

[Serenitydawn]

Awesome, thank you for that! It's similar to what's written in the Diabolicon in a way, from the Church of Satan/Temple of Set. I had only heard a little of this before, thank you so much for that!!! [grin]

[Bohemian Alchemyst]

I'm almost a year out of date but I would strongly advise scepticism in drawing definite conclusions from Gnostic mythology.

For example, the idea that the Demiurge is an evil entity in the objective sense would almost certainly not be what was thought among the schools collected under the "gnostic" heading. An idea apparent in Basilides and Valentinus was that the Demiurge should be rejected because it is an anthropomorphisation of God; it is man casting the Infinite in their own image, that of a law making, vindictive Rabbi in the sky. In this sense, Gnostics would say that the "god" worship by modern fundamentalists is a mental image superimposed onto the Absolute which only serves to obscure the Truth.

The concept of Gnosticism is a fairly modern one. The term itself is a late 19th century attempt to collect together early heretical Christian movements, some of which have nothing in common with what is generally considered Gnosticism. The ideas that make up "Gnosticism" (immortal soul in a mortal body, reincarnation, liberation, etc,) have their roots in pre-Christian mysteries, particularly the Dionysian and Persian mysteries as well as late Platonism.