The Great Irony of The Gnostic Creation Myth and Its Plan for Salvation: The Lie That Intellect and Secret Knowledge Will Save You
Adapted from Gnosticism Explained
According to the Gnostic interpretation of Genesis, The Creator God imprisoned Adam and Eve in a world of misery and gave them a subservient soul, anchored in unintellectual darkness. As The Bible says, after eating the forbidden fruit, Adam and Eve hid themselves, ashamed by the mistake they had made. God arrived in paradise and called Adam with these words: “Where are you?” He appeared to be acting like a master calling his servant. When he didn't find him, he seemed to be saying: “Where are you? Why have you hidden yourself? What have you done?”, which when interpreted properly in its Coptic linguistic context, we understand this passage to mean that The Lord was speaking rhetorically for the benefit of His Creation, knowing quite well what Adam and Eve had done.
One of the things that set Gnosticism apart from the other varieties of early Christianity was its astonishing creation myth, an interpretation of the creation myth of Genesis that practically turns that Old Testament text upside down. To very briefly summarize that underlying model: God the Father gave rise to a host of spiritual beings (“Aeons“) who populated Heaven (which the Gnostics called The Pleroma, “The Fullness”), including a divine Mother and Christ. One of the last of these beings to emanate from the Father, Sophia, gave birth to a new being on her own, without the involvement of her partner or the approval of the Father. The being born under such circumstances was nothing like the perfect inhabitants of the Pleroma; instead, he was ignorant and malevolent. This was the Demiurge, “craftsman,” whom the Gnostics identified with the God of the Old Testament and creator of Earth, which they found evil and fallen from its origins. This is very different than The Biblical account which identifies The Earth as a paradise from its origins, and then later as fallen by the work of Lucifer, who had offered intellect to Mankind for Salvation.
He created the material world to mirror his own wicked personality and trapped sparks of divinity, fragments of the Pleroma, within humans. It was then up to Christ to awaken humans to their true nature and liberate them from the world by His example, but never by His sacrifice to redeem and save Mankind. At this stage, The Gnostics made it very clear that Mankind must earn Salvation though the intellectual struggle to attain Gnosis (Knowledge), and not by any work done on their behalf by the evil Demiurge Creator God. In doing this, The Gnostics separated Mankind from the free gift of Salvation from the sacrifice of Christ, and thereby, chained Mankind to the impossible struggle to save himself though intellectual power, which we see manifested in modern Scientism. No Man has ever saved himself or become Enlightened, per se. All Mankind has done is chase his tail and mesmerize himself for centuries under the false Satanic veil of Gnostic light, always dying at the end of one life, and never returning for a second life. All The Gnostic promises of Eternal Life prove self-evidently false and deceptive in the final analysis of The Gnostic Myth.
And, all the gurus of Eastern Mysticism, with their myriad of heretical Gnostic schisms, including Quantum Physics, Astrophysics Astronomy, and Artificial Intelligence, have done is further mire Mankind on a labyrinthian cycle of occult cul de sacs, leading to an endless downward spiral of occult entanglement, leading to death.
You see, no matter how much The Gnostics offered the world intellectual power, (Gnosis) as a method of salvation and victory over death, they could never conquer death, which was Lucifer’s promise in the Garden:
4 And the serpent (Lucifer) said unto the woman, Ye shall not surely die:
5 For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.
6 And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to make one wise, she took of the fruit thereof, and did eat, and gave also unto her husband with her; and he did eat.
Genesis 3:4-6
Subsequently, it is easy to see why The Gnostics hate the plan for Salvation through the sacrifice of Christ for the sins of The World. This plan for Salvation usurps their entire mythological cannon and gives Lucifer no power over Mankind. Hence, the quest for Salvation through the Luciferian secret knowledge of the intellect is the greatest deception of all time, the original serpentine deception from The Garden.
Getting back to The Gnostic interpretation of The Cosmos, they believed that this Demiurge Creator God created Adam and Eve incapable of distinguishing between good and evil, between the “uncreated kingdom” and the created one. He also created them ignorant of their origin and their destiny. Why did he create them like this? According to Gnosticism, The Creator didn’t want Man to know his true origin. This world was created against the will of “The Unknowable God”, and this was something The Creator did not want Man to know. He didn't want them (and still doesn’t) to know the spiritual situation in which they were living, who they were, or why they had been created in order to keep them oppressed.
According to The Gnostics, The Demiurge Creator, Yahweh, wanted them to remain ignorant by denying them the intellectual fire that Lucifer could provide for them, and allegedly still does to this very day. Therefore, as The Gnostic taught, he forbade them to eat from The Tree of Knowledge because it would "open their eyes", wake them up, and make them notice who they were, where they came from, the situation they were in, and what they had to do to escape this evil Demiurge Creator God.. It would make them aware that Eden wasn't paradise, but just the opposite, a spiritual prison. This was how The Gnostics inverted The Genesis account.
Thus, The Gnostics believed that in order to acquire Salvation, one must possess a certain intellectual knowledge, or Gnosis, which must be delivered to a person by a messenger of light. However, to receive this knowledge, one must be trying to reach beyond the evil, dark, material, physical Earth and human body toward that of the “good, light”, immaterial, and spiritual worlds. The indwelling spark must be awakened from its terrestrial slumber by the salvific knowledge that comes “from without.”
Essentially, Gnosticism is the teaching based on Gnosis, the knowledge of transcendence arrived at by way of interior, intuitive means, and the exercise of the intellect. Although Gnosticism thus rests on personal religious experience, it is a mistake to assume all such experience results in Gnostic recognitions. It is nearer the truth to say that Gnosticism expresses a specific religious experience, an experience that does not lend itself to the language of theology or philosophy, but which is instead closely affinitized to, and expresses itself through, the medium of myth. Indeed, one finds that most Gnostic scriptures take the forms of myths. The term “myth” should not here be taken to mean “stories that are not true”, but rather, that the truths embodied in these myths are of a different order from the dogmas of theology or the statements of philosophy.
In Gnosticism, Christ, though unable to redeem or save Mankind by His sacrifice by virtue of the fallenness imbued into Mankind by the deeds of his ancestors, Adam and Eve, is, nevertheless, one of the most fundamental “awakeners” of this intellectual knowledge, or Gnosis. Therefore, although Gnostics, like some Christians, find partial Salvation through the messages and teachings of Christ, The Gnostics seek Salvation not from sin but from “the ignorance of which sin is a consequence.” The Gnostics believe that the evil creator God, Yahweh, and his angels cause this ignorance. According to The Gnostics, if one receives intellectual power through Gnosis during one’s lifetime, a true realization of the spirit-body dichotomy and the true destiny of the soul is attained. Then at death, when the body releases “the divine spark”, the soul may be free of the evil world. On the other hand, if this realization is not reached, then the ignorant soul, when released from the body, will be sent back by the Demiurge (Evil Creator God) into the evil painful world, which is simply the precursor and template for what was to become Hinduism and Buddhism, embedded with the Law of Karma, The Dharma, Samsaras, The Endless Wheel of Life and Death, and *Reincarnation. In fact, Hinduism, and it offshoot, Buddhism are nothing more than a repackaging of Satanic Gnostic occultism.
But here is The Great Irony of Gnosticism:
BEFORE Lucifer offered Mankind the fire of intellect in the form of the metaphorical token of the “forbidden fruit”, Mankind already had Eternal Life via the Tree of Life from The Lord. Mankind was already perfect and in complete wholeness, equilibrium, and harmony with The Lord, by virtue of his obedience and reverence of The Lord. But within the perfection that The Lord had embedded with His Creation, Mankind, there came a caveat: Free Will. And with the gift of Free Will, which made Man a quasi-autonomous and independent entity, free to roam and choose whatever he would, which, by the way, was the very opposite of what The Gnostics were erroneously preaching about the relationship between The Lord and Hid creation, Mankind, there came the potential to be seduced by evil.
Enter Lucifer in The Garden of Eden in the form of The Serpent.
Note: Now, whether you view The Serpent to be literal of metaphorical is wholly irrelevant to the purpose and function of the message of The Genesis account.
Now, ironically, AFTER Mankind fell to the seductions of Lucifer and accepted the token of secret intellectual knowledge, (The Forbidden Fruits) Mankind, thereafter, lost Eternal Life, and was forever thrust into the darkness of attempting to regain Salvation through and endless and fruitless struggle to attain more and more intellectual secret knowledge, which has proven to only mire Mankind in an Eternal Darkness of false Enlightenment. In other words, the deception of Lucifer in promising Eternal Life actually resulted in stripping Mankind of his preexisting state of Eternal Life with The Lord. This, ironically, in seeking Eternal Life through intellectual fire, Mankind lost Eternal Life.
In short, The Great Irony of Gnosticism is that it promises Salvation and Eternal Life, but it realty, Mankind already possessed this state of grace before falling for the temptation of intellectual occult knowledge in The Garden, and hence, it was The Gnostic Luciferian promise of Eternal Life though the intellectual Promethean fire that actually stripped Mankind of his Eternal stature with a Perfect Creator.
Well written and truthful account of Gnosticism . Nice to see the comparison outlined here !