“In his arrogance, Yaldeboath decides that he is the most powerful being in the universe and he declares himself to be the only God. The Demiurge then goes on to create the physical world, together with various archons, heavens and powers. Some of these are thought to belong to the 365 days of the year and others to the seven days of the week. Yet others seem to be more personal, for they deal with emotional and mystic forces.
“The Apocryphon is incredibly detailed as to the creation of man. The Archons, as we have seen elsewhere, attempt to creat a man, They fail to give him life, however, since they cannot make him move until Sophia tricks Yaldeboath into breathing his essence of the Light into man, allowing him to become a living being. Finally comes the creation story of Genesis with its episode in the garden: Adam and Eve eat of the “Tree of Knowledge” and are cast out.
“It is an interesting exercise to deconstruct the myth simply to understand the culture and thinking which gave birth to it. …
“First we have Unity in the Light; then duality in the pairing; recognition of the Three in the Trinity; four within the creative soup and so on. If we allow it to, this can take us into the hidden significance of numbers.” ~Bernard Simon
The Demiurge Declares Himself God
This is the start of everything going wrong. Whether you think of the Demiurge as a single being, or as a group name for the fallen angels led by Lucifer makes little difference. When he/they decided in their arrogance that they were equal to the true God, they crossed a line that should never have been crossed. The decision that they were equal to God meant that they had no reason to operate within the Laws of God, but could make up their own rules. They then decide that they could create a universe of their own, with their laws, and where they ruled. That is the start of the physical universe of death, disease, and destruction. Yaldabaoth, the Demiurge, is the jealous god, the angry,destructive god. He is not the real God, not the God that Jesus called Father.
Archons, Heavens, and Powers
Simon says that, according to the Gnostic “myth,” the Demiurge created Archons, heavens, and powers. This is being put into the language that people of the distant path could understand. Today we might say that with the creation of the physical universe, Yaldeboath also created various forces, energies, and powers. Some of these forces do good, others are destructive. In Cosolargy, we recognize that there are forces that tend to pull us further down into matter and complete materialism. But there are also forces that try to pull us up to the higher levels of being, the spiritual levels. We can just be like a piece of driftwood being pulled hither and yon by those forces, or we can choose to help those forces that we want to pull on us. Hopefully, that is the spiritual forces trying to save us, and not the destructive forces trying to destroy us. As the old Native American legend of the Two Wolves says, the wolf you feed is the one that wins.
Creation of Man
I think the Apocryphal creation of man as given in the quote is intended to be allegorical, not literal. Either way, I don’t think it is accurate. We know that man existed before the fall into matter, otherwise, there would have been nothing to fall. What the Archons and the Demiurge created was a physical body for man. But we existed long before that as purely spiritual beings. In any case, this tells us that not only was the physical universe a creation of the Demiurge and his Archons, so was man in his physical form. Fortunately, however, we are not just physical beings. We have a spirit and soul. That gives us the power, should we choose to use it, to reverse the process and become beings of pure spirit again.
Tree of Knowledge
There is much misunderstanding with regard to Adam and Eve and the eating of the forbidden “fruit”. I really don’t know how so many jumped to the conclusion that this forbidden fruit was a simple apple, yet today many believe that is what it was. Why should a simple apple have been the forbidden fruit?
First, the full name of the tree was the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. It is important that the full name is used if we are to understand why it was forbidden. Knowledge is a great thing, but knowledge of evil is not. You don’t teach people how to make bombs with the expectation that doing so will make them peaceful. You don’t teach people how to use a sword with the idea that they will ten grow flowers. You teach such things so they become warriors. And learning knowledge of good and evil meant that some would become evil. That is why it was forbidden. Not because a dictatorial God liked to create arbitrary restrictions.
This Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil was the source of physical light, a sun much like the one we have now. That light carried knowledge just as light now carries knowledge. And that light triggered the process that made Adam and Eve become physical beings. This was the gift of the Demiurge and his Archons.
