Aeons, Archons, Angels, or Aliens?

 Aeons, Archons, Angels, or Aliens?     A Gnostic Interpretation of Ancient Aliens Theory

Cyd Charise Ropp, Ph.D.

During the lost months of the 2020 shutdown, I spent much of my time watching the History Channel series "Ancient Aliens." I began with a skeptical mind, but was soon persuaded by the variety of evidence presented. Many years earlier I had read Erich von Danikens’ Chariots of the Gods, so I had the basic outline of ancient alien theory already in my head. I had also read Whitley Streiber’s Communion when it came out, so I felt I had a passing familiarity with the concept of alien abductions. But the evidence presented on "Ancient Aliens" goes far beyond those early revelations. By this point in time, only a dedicated naysayer could remain completely skeptical.

Here’s the ancient aliens theory: that a variety of aliens from off-planet have been visiting our earth for thousands, if not millions, of years. That the stories told around the world by ancient human cultures of gods descending from the sky and living among them are true histories and not mere fables. That ancient aliens have given knowledge to humanity, particularly technological knowledge, to assist in the progress of human culture. That ancient aliens may have edited our DNA to make us into the modern human form we see today, and that they are possibly continuing to edit our DNA by means of alien abductions.  Moreover, it is even suggested that our entire ecosystem may have been seeded by aliens from the get-go, including the placement of our moon to stabilize earth’s axis and to create tidal motion.

I persuaded my brother, Bill, to watch the program with me, and so it is that we have watched and discussed every episode of their 15-season run that has been rebroadcast over the past couple of years, some more than once. Yes, many of the stories presented in the series overlap, and most of the evidence shows up time and again with the same commentary attached, yet my brother and I have found the repetition helpful in our effort to discern the truth of various aspects of the ancient aliens claim.

Bill and I are nothing if not open-minded, yet we anchor our gullibility with an unusually well-developed sense of logic and critical thinking. As you know, both of us are PhDs with specialties in Philosophy and Rhetoric, and we have both taught critical thinking and logic at universities. So do not come away with the idea that we uncritically bought every claim hook, line, and sinker. 

We have paid special attention to the question continually raised by the ancient aliens theorists—were these “gods” of the pre-flood era merely misinterpreted alien visitors with alien tech? Are the “fallen angels” of the Book Enoch angels from God, or were they actually ancient astronauts who moved to earth and occasionally married human women? It is said that the worldwide flood was sent by God to wipe out the angel-human offspring known as Nephilim. What were the Nephilim and what God would have wiped out the entire earth and everyone on it to kill them off, and how is it that some humans were spared by warnings from “angels”?

As observed by the program’s resident theorists, these types of stories can be taken as fables or as true histories and, if histories, are these actually the Biblical God, angels, and the gods of ancient cultures, or are they actually advanced, off-planet aliens who are apparently engaged in disagreements over human destiny, with sometimes catastrophic consequences?  These are the questions that have occupied much discussion between Bill and me over the past couple of years, and they have run on a parallel track to our Gnostic Theology pursuits as we untangle the differences and origins of archons, aeons, angels, and fallen angels, and the difference between the God Above All Gods and the God of this world. I am happy to announce that we have turned a rhetorical corner and landed upon some sound hypotheses at last. Perhaps you can use our analysis the next time you consider the role of extra-terrestrials in our world.

I realize that the following memes I’m going to share with you may sound new and strange unless you have previously studied gnostic cosmology. If you are new to Gnostic Insights, I encourage you to go to the GnosticInsights.com website and open the menu tab called “The Gnostic Gospel Primer.” There you will find a Valentinian Gnostic cosmology based upon the Tripartite Tractate book of the Nag Hammadi library. These initial eight episodes lay out in a clear and understandable way the basic cosmology of our universe and the origins of all things. The story is not difficult to understand, but it helps to listen to it from the beginning and go in order. There you will find episodes describing the God Above All Gods, as well as entities known as Aeons which dwell in a space called the Fullness of God, also known as the Pleroma. Aeons, by virtue of the fact that they dwell in the Pleroma, are by definition a type of ET.

This ancient well in Sardinia, Italy, the Santa Christina well, is said to represent the “keyhole shape” found throughout the ancient world. To me, it looks like the Pleroma.

Ancient alien theorists speak of ETs directing evolution to create our intelligent hominid species. Ancient alien theorists call into question the mainstream theory of evolution. They rightly point out that this planet of ours has not been around long enough for evolution to have spontaneously bumbled upon our exquisite design. They even call into question the premise that life on earth evolved randomly from a primordial soup into ever-increasing complexity and function. “Pan-spermia” has been proposed as a method by which primitive alien life forms hitchhiked their way across the heavens on asteroids to seed our oceans. According to ancient alien theorists, ETs probably interfered throughout ancient history to promote life on earth, including many interventions in protohumans to direct our upward evolution.

I tend to agree with much of what they say about the impossibility of Darwinian evolution to achieve our current biosphere. I invite you to listen to the Gnostic Insights podcast called “Evolution and Conscious Aeonic Design,” which you can find at the Gnostic Insights.com website menu under the tab “Complete Episodes Library.”  In that episode I call into question Darwinian evolution in favor of the same sort of planned evolution promoted by the ancient alien theorists. But where they identify “ETs” as the source, I identify those ETs as Aeons of the Fullness directing evolution.

Episode Four of the Gnostic Insights Primer describes these Aeons that came before this universe. The Aeons populate the Fullness of God in the Pleroma, and they consist of names, places, personalities, powers, and forces, all arranged in a hierarchy, each of them representing a quality of God that would come to realization in this cosmos in which we dwell. It is through their intervention in our universe that evolution occurs to bring about their vision of our material cosmos.  Simply ascribing evolution to the intervention of flesh and blood ETs merely pushes back the same ontological problems of random evolution—order cannot arise spontaneously out of disorder. 52 card pickup never finds the cards stacked in suits, and endless games of 52 card pickup over billions of years simply cannot achieve endless results of order from chaos. The physics of entropy always wins out. No matter how many times you toss the components of life up into the air, they never assemble themselves into complex working structures on the way down.

What is true for physical evolution is also true of technological innovation. Ancient alien theorists point out that our most important technological innovations are often discovered simultaneously by multiple inventors worldwide. Whether it’s old tech such as language, medicine, metallurgy, and architecture, or new tech such as radio, relativity theory, and the telephone, these inventions appear without evolutionary precedent, arriving fully formed to multiple people, often through dreams and visions. The ancient alien theorists ascribe these technological innovations to ETs guiding our development, either through physical manifestation as the benevolent gods of ancient earth cultures, or nowadays through the transpersonal field or Askashic record. They suggest the Akashic record is a pre-scripted, computer-type code, existing in a transdimensional space, that humans are programmed to access as needed.

Ancient alien theorist include our DNA as a form of proof of non-evolutionary technological leaps, as our modern human form does not appear to have evolved from more primitive versions. Yes, there were numerous protohumans, but they all mysteriously disappeared by the end of the last ice age, or the time of the great flood.

I agree that there is a transpersonal field, which is the repository of our collective memes—all that were, are, and will be. But I ascribe this transpersonal field to the divine dimension of the mind of the Universal Unit of Consciousness as described in my Simple Explanation blog and book. And I would agree that we are triggered to access this field as needed. It happens all the time in our daily lives for all sorts of information. Same thing holds true for inventors who see a need and whose contemplation leads them into the field for solutions.

The ancient alien theorists suggest that it is our familiarity with the field that is leading us in the trans-human direction of hooking our human brains up to a computer-mediated “cloud” so we can access information on demand and even download our complete consciousness, thereby achieving non-material immortality. Here I strongly disagree. I would say that the force behind such a drive for incorporeal immortality has two motivations. One motivation is our innate spiritual connectivity to the Fullness of God, the Son, and the Father, which promises the continuation of our immortal souls after death. The other motivation is from the other side of the coin—that of the archonic desire to achieve god-like status, including omniscience and immortality, without the benefit of God’s will and blessing. In other words, it’s replay of the presumptuous thought that brought about the Fall of Logos. It seems clear to me that our tech billionaires who are leading the way with transhumanism and space exploration are themselves personally playing out the Fall of Logos in their attempt to play God.

Again, if you have not listened to the Gnostic Insights Primer episodes, you will find a full episode devoted to the Fall of Logos and its cosmic consequences. You will find these episodes at the Gnostic Insights.com website under the menu tab labeled “The Gnostic Gospel Primer.”

Ancient alien theorists suggest that ancient astronauts developed our planet in order to create a sentient species fit to house the Ba, or soul, as described by ancient Egyptians. They theorize that ETs created humans to be vessels for souls, which implies that without their intervention, creatures do not have souls. Of all the theories proposed, this one strikes me as completely off-base. I would say that all creatures have souls. According to Gnostic cosmology, all creatures are the fruit of the Aeons. The Aeons sent their fruit into creation in order to populate creation with the Fullness of God. This fruit is called the Second Order of Powers, and we are all Second Order Powers, from bacteria on up to humans and beyond. If the universe is indeed populated by extra terrestrial life forms, then these, too, would be Second Order Powers because all life forms are. And all of us Second Order Powers possess souls.

There is, however, one type of entity in the universe that does not possess a soul, because these entities are not creatures from the Fullness of God. These entities are called archons. Archons are the inverted shadows of Aeons. Archons are incorporeal waves of entropy that emanate from the Demiurge. Archons are not "fallen angels" because they never were angels. We know these archons as demonic forces that frustrate and bedevil us in order to feed off of our negative energy. The world's bad habits and cruelty are shepherded by archons. They are the forces the Second Order Powers were sent to do battle with in a never-ending war for dominion of the cosmos. For more on this topic, listen to Episode Five of The Gnostic Gospel Primer called "The Deficiency and Boundary."  

Knowing what we know about archons, we can identify the non-physical entity known as Satan as an archon. Satan is also called The Accuser, and he is the source of temptation and illness, and the head of an army of demons or archons. Traditional theology identifies Satan as a fallen angel who rebelled against God because God elevated humans above angels. I would reinterpret this myth in a Gnostic way by saying that the God against whom Satan rebelled was not the Father God Above All Gods, but rather the God of this world, who is called the Demiurge in Gnostic texts. It is the Demiurge that Satan sprang from and it is the Demiurge with whom Satan struck the wager concerning the fate of Job. Satan is also credited with advancing human technology.

The archons appear to be very interested in advancing human technology. I suspect this is because it is easier to distract, delude, and even destroy humanity via technology than with any other means. Not only war technology and weaponry, but more benign appearing helpful technologies. I'm sure I don't need to tell you how destructive and divisive the internet has become through the innovation of social media. And how appealing and irresistible television has become! Then there is the realm of virtual reality—a realm controlled by archons who want nothing more than to delude and ensnare human souls. This type of delusion and division is the bread and butter of archons. So, when ancient aliens theorists point out the leaps made in technological innovation by the influence of incorporeal beings, I suspect archons at play.

Which brings us to angels. Angels are described as beings who appear to be trans-dimensional. By that I mean that sometimes they appear as physical humans and sometimes they appear as incorporeal light beings. They can physically touch humans, as when Peter was awakened in his prison cell by an angel's touch, yet the same angel can pass through solid walls, as recounted in Acts 12:7. It is said that angels were sent to earth to protect and assist humans, and 70% of Americans believe they have a guardian angel. In Gnostic cosmology, it appears that angels are a type of being created by the Fullness of God, specifically for the benefit of humans, to assist them in the never-ending war against the archons. Angels are possibly aeonic personalities that have come from the Pleroma to assist. Therefore, when ancient alien theorists tell of incidents where non-corporeal beings appear as light forms to interfere in a positive manner with human technology, these are angels. Examples of angelic interference include the occasions where mysterious forces have appeared above U.S. ICBM sites and disabled nuclear-armed missles in their silos. These beings have also appeared outside the windows of the International Space Station and U.S. space missions to the moon.

So far we have identified Aeons, archons, and angels as entities who insert themselves into human affairs. But what of actual off-world, flesh and blood ETs from other planets and galaxies? Do they really exist? Yes, the remainder of encounters appear to be ETs. Ancient alien theorists propose that in the days before the flood, "gods" lived side by side with humans and occasionally took human women as sexual partners. These ETs claimed to have come from the star systems of Sirius and Orion in particular. These ETs had advanced technologies that they shared with the humans around them. They designed the ancient monolithic structures, including the pyramids found around the earth on every continent. They were the ones who used their tech to levitate gigantic boulders into place in stone structures all over the earth. Many of them appeared to have elongated skulls and green or blue skin. Some of them had reptilian, birdlike, or insectoid features, and some appeared to have non-human heads of canines, lions, and other animals. The Book of Enoch reports that some ETs mated with human women and produced monstrous offspring known as the Nephilim.  Enoch says that the great flood unleashed to cleanse the earth of these hybrid abominations, as they were not part of God's plan for humanity. After the flood, the ETs on earth seem to have retreated or gone into hiding. Occasional modern sightings of strange humanoid creatures living deep underground, under the ocean, or under the ice of Antarctica, hint at their possible continued presence.

It is my opinion that the extra-terrestrials can be thought of as Second Order Powers just like us. It is often suggested by ancient alien theorists that the ET civilizations may be a million years more advanced than our own, and that is how it is they have interstellar flight and other advanced powers and technology. Looking at this theory with a Gnostic eye, it is my theory that we can think of their home planets as exactly like ours, but far ahead of us in time. In keeping with the concept of fractals, I suggest that these ET civilizations advanced with the aid of Aeonic design, and struggled with their own archonic influences, exactly as we do now. It is highly likely that civilizations all eventually fall as the egos of the ETs struggle against one another for dominion and control, even as we do—a fractal replication of the Fall of Logos. Ancient alien theorists point to evidence of space battles above and on earth in the past, including a notable battle above Nuremberg in 1561.

Just as we are planning to do, it is likely that ETs sent out their own exploration and colonization missions, and that some of them came to planet earth. They probably had the same motivations that our own tech billionaires have—preservation of their genetic line against future catastrophes married to the archonic drive to be as gods and terraform worlds to their own ends. There is also pictorial evidence that some of these ETs may have been robots given the task of seeking out and terraforming worlds. It is also quite possible that the civilizations that sent out the ET missions have already destroyed themselves through plague or warfare.

Finally, let us turn to the question of the ultimate ET: God. Who and What Is He? 

Episode Two of the Gnostic Insights podcasts describes the attributes of the Father, also known as the God Above All Gods. Briefly, the Father is the Illimitable, Eternal, Omniscient Consciousness that underlies our reality. The Father does not look or sound like anything.  He doesn’t hold conversations the way we do. The Father is undifferentiated consciousness itself. This Consciousness is the ground state from which all subsequent events emerge.

Possibly the most egregious heresy in Gnosticism is the proposition that the God of the Old Testament, Creator of Heaven and Earth, the Jealous God of the Hebrews, Yahweh, or Jehovah, is not the Father on High that Jesus called Father. The God of this earth is known to Gnostics as the Demiurge, and He arose as a result of the Fall of Logos the Aeon due to Logos’s presumptuous thought. To learn more about this topic in depth, please listen to Episode Four of the Gnostic Insights podcast.

The God of the Old Testament, Yahweh, is more tangible than the Father Above. Yahweh has discussions with humans as well as with entities such as Satan. He uses language and engages in prolonged conversations, as when He gave precise building instructions for the ark to Noah. He even makes wagers over Job and appears to change his mind regarding the sacrifice of Isaac.  When people refer to God as an old white man with a beard, it is the image of the Demiurge to which they refer, not the undifferentiated consciousness of the Father. This Demiurge character is the God Yahweh, the God of this world and the God of the Hebrews especially. It is the Demiurge that has a special relationship with the children of Abraham. Yahweh takes care of the Hebrews when they pray to Him and follow His rules, and He has arranged a variety of cataclysms, plagues, and floods, to preserve their particular line of DNA. Yahweh favors the Hebrews in battles.

Therefore, it seems to me that when ancient alien theorists refer to God as having sent the world wide cataclysm and flood that wiped out the Nephilim and all but about 3,000 surviving humans, it is the work of the Demiurge calling himself God. This is the jealous God who wants sole control of the earth and the God who is angered by uppity archons like Satan and other "fallen angels." This is the God who wants Abraham to sacrifice his son, Isaac, on the mountain as a show of faith. But it was a true angel of the true Father Above who stayed Abraham's hand and saved Isaac's life. It is the Demiurge who tired of his people's captivity in Egypt and sent the plagues so the Pharoah would release the Hebrew slaves and who parted the seas to make good their escape. But it was true angels from the true God who protected the Hebrews during their 40 year trek through the desert, guiding them with their light bodies and feeding them with mana.

Well, there you have it. Aeons, archons, angels, or aliens?  I hope these distinctions help you sort out the ancient aliens theory.

Take a Look at the article on my New Gnostic Gospel blog--"Our Aeonic Inheritance"

I just posted a nifty article on my other blog, titled "Our Aeonic Inheritance." If you're curious about human nature and Gnostic cosmology, you may find the article interesting.

Here's a sample from "Our Aeonic Inheritance," by Cyd Ropp

In my imagination, the Pleroma sits in its hierarchy like a pyramidal-shaped slime mold. The fascinating thing about slime molds is that they are comprised of single-celled organisms that work as a fully integrated whole, moving as one, simultaneously sharing information and nutrition across the entirety. “All for one and one for all” is their motto. Like the slime mold, the Pleroma is both a singular unit as well as a collection of individuals with one mind, singing one song, dreaming one dream.

The dream of the Pleroma is that place we humans recognize as Paradise. In this dream of theirs, there are the “figures” which preceded us and our world. The Pleroma dreams of our entire cosmos, including everything and everyone in it, with all of the figures imagined in the same manner a human filmmaker imagines the characters and settings of a movie long before the stage is built, characters cast, and the play enacted and filmed. And the way the Paradise is constructed and populated is by the aeons (Totalities)  combining their abilities and talents to make up novel combinations of themselves.

According to the Tripartite Tractate, we are the “living figures” that represent in this material world the figures and forces of the Pleroma, and we are patterned directly from them and we are their “fruit.”

Click here to read the full article

Gnostic Gospel, Pt 6 -- The Rise of the Deficiency

Notice: There is now a separate blog dedicated to the New Gnostic Gospel. You can get there by clicking here.

The most perfect and complete of the individual aeons, Logos, crowned the top of the aeonic hierarchy. This single aeon consisted of all of the attributes of the good and perfect Fullness rolled into one individual.

Logos Crowns the Fullness

Over the course of illuminating the Gnostic Gospel, the Simple Explanation has designed a series of visual metaphors representing facets of Gnostic and Christian belief. For the fullest understanding of this article, you may wish to read the entire Gnostic Gospel Illuminated series from the beginning.  If you would prefer to first read the "Simple Gnostic Gospel, Part One: The Father, The Son, and the Birth of The ALL," click here.

Logos mistook itself for the Fullness.

Logos Mistakes Itself for the Entire Fullness

Logos decided to give glory to the Source of its awakening and launched itself from the hierarchy in an attempt to reconnect with the Father. Logos believed his personal will was sufficient to reach the Father, without the will of the united Fullness to add to his own.

Logos Attempts to Reach the Father and Falls

Logos imagined he could build the Paradise dreamt by the Fullness because he understood all of the plans and possessed all of the necessary talents. However, without the willing support of the Fullness, Logos was unable to give proper glory to the Father.

Logos Falling

As he reached for the Father, Logos stumbled and fell, shattering himself to bits.

Because the isolated glory of Logos was inadequate to the task, everything he produced as a result of that effort fell disastrously short. Where there had been unity with the Son and with his brethren in the Fullness, now there was “a division and a turning away.” The undiluted will expressed by the Fullness was splintered because Logos “could not bear to look at the light, but looked at the depths, and he faltered.” [The Tripartite Tractate, v. 77]

“What issued from his presumptuous thought and his arrogance had existed from something that itself was deficient; because of that, what was perfect in him left him and went upward to his own” in the Fullness, leaving the “sicknesses” behind in the darkness. [The Tripartite Tractate, v. 78]

The Deficiency Resembles Disordered Phantoms of the Aeons

“From the faltering and division came oblivion and ignorance of oneself and of that which is.” [The Tripartite Tractate, v. 77]  Presumptuous thought and arrogance was left in place of wisdom.

“Those who came into being from the presumptuous thought resemble in fact the Fullnesses of whom they are imitations, though they are phantoms, shadows, and illusions, deprived of reason and light, belonging to this empty thought, being nobody’s offspring. . .  In their own eyes, however, they are great and powerful beings, more beautiful than the names [of their originals in the Fullness], though they are only their shadows.” [The Tripartite Tractate, v. 78]

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Read the next article in the series: The Simple Gnostic Gospel, Part Seven: "Division Becomes the Imitation"

Those readers who are put off by the name "God" or other religious words like the "Father," the "Son," and the "Holy Spirit," are free to continue using more modern memes like "consciousness" and "self-awareness," "algorithms" and "fractals." You may study these same topics in my Simple Explanation blog and book. However, if you are already familiar with Hebrew and Christian memes, then you will understand these Gnostic writings without needing to first dip into the Simple Explanation, and so you may skip the following translation.

The Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything refers to the Father as the Metaverse, that which is above our Universe.

The Simple Explanation calls the Son the Universal Unit of Consciousness, because while identical to the Father, or Metaverse, this all-knowing consciousness is now also a singular Unit. In fractal terms, the Son is the first iteration of the pattern of consciousness. 

The ALL is every thing that will ever be, in potential. They began as unrealized fractal iterations of the pattern of the Son. This is the second iteration of the singular Unit, which carries the formulae of our universe. 

The Fullness represents the expressed fractals of the third iteration: the proliferation of singular Units of Consciousness. These fractals are called "aeons," and they have multiplied into the potential of all forms, processes, and personalities. In same way that an individual's DNA carries its species' potential form, so each unit of consciousness carries within itself the complete pattern of creation. 

The ongoing cooperation amongst the Fullness is the prototype for the Simple Explanation's Golden Rule, which the Simple Explanation puts it this way: "In order for units of consciousness to join and work together for the greater good, they need to share relevant information, they need to assist one another's efforts, and they need to love one another."   

In the same way that the ALL sat in unitary perfection together while singing the same song of praise, so do we all instantiate the pattern of cooperation needed to "get the job done" when we work together for the greater good, without selfish motive. So, too, the Fullness, though differentiated into units of consciousness with individual stations and ranks, dreams of a Paradise where everyone knows their job and does it in perfect cooperation with others for the benefit of all. 

Logos represents the best possible single individual that could ever exist, for its personality contains the formula for every good thing possible. Yet, even then, Logos was unable to create on his own because he lacked the "will" to carry it out. The will is what the Simple Explanation identifies as the coherent, pre-energetic potential that enters our universe through the portal of here and now. The will would be the Metaversal information streaming into our universe via the singularity at the center of the Universal Unit of Consciousness. While Logos identified himself with the Universal UC, Logos was mistaken, for he deviated from the Universal algorithm when his individual will conflicted with the will of the Fullness. 

The phantoms produced by the Fall are not fractal iterations of the Son. They are broken code. The phantoms cannot replicate on their own; they lack activation by the Source at the center, as they are generated away from the metaversal portal in what the Simple Explanation used to call the doughy ring of the donut.

But don't worry about translating back and forth between the Simple Explanation and the Gnostic Gospel. Use whichever type of language appeals to you--it is the same truth.

Yearning for the Pleroma

Notice: There is now a separate blog dedicated to the New Gnostic Gospel. You can get there by clicking here.

Other words for the Gnostic word "pleroma" include the "Fullness," the "All," the "Totalities," and "the circle of divine attributes," which gives you a pretty good idea of what pleroma means. The way wikipedia defines the term is much more challenging and kind of discouraging because of its complexity, especially the section on Gnosticism. 

Only one book of the Bible mentions the Pleroma--a letter written to the church in Colosse by the apostle Paul. In the translation of Colossians 2:9 below, Pleroma has been rendered as "the fullness."

"For in Him [Christ] dwells all the fullness of the Godhead bodily; and you are complete in Him, who is the head of all principality and power" (Col. 2:9).

The footnote under this verse in my edition of the New King James Version goes on to completely misinterpret the meaning of the statement in its rush to dismiss the Gnostic implications of the verse. The Nelson editors contend that "the Gnostics thought the fullness of God had been divided among a number of angelic beings, the last creating the material world. In contrast, Paul says that the fullness of God exists in Christ... This contradicts the Gnostic idea of  the inherent evil of physical bodies and the claim that Jesus is merely a spirit (p. 2014, Nelson Study Bible. 1997).

While I do agree with the opening premise that "the Gnostics thought the fullness of God had been divided among a number of ... beings," there are at least four misrepresentations I see in the Nelson explanation of the verse.

First, the idea that the fullness can't be both completely in Christ and at the same time divided into aeons. No need to say, "In contrast," since the two traits are not mutually exclusive. Let's imagine how that would work.

Did you know that you can click on any blog picture to see it larger on your computer screen?
Here are the first four phases of Gnostic Cosmology, according to the Tripartite Tractate. Upper right corner: God the Father represented as the background paper of the entire poster. Upper left corner: I've represented the Son as a diffuse cloud of will. Middle: the Pleroma/the fullness represented as the Son's cloud with distinct lines representing the aeonic traits. The pyramid at the lower right represents the individual aeons after they have named themselves and differentiated the Son's will into hierarchies of traits and powers.

We begin with the Father, since this is the ground state underlying all else. We all know that the Father is unknowable. Too big, too exalted for us mere mortals to contemplate directly. The Father is the Immortal One who never changes and without whom nothing would exist. The indisputable buck-stops-here God. This being is pure consciousness, without form or distinctions, all quiet, eternally undivided. This is the One Who Is; the Great I Am. In my drawings, the Father is represented as the paper that makes up the poster--all other manifestations arise as images upon the paper and are fully contained by the paper.

The Son is represented by the starburst cloud at the upper left, although the starburst is not really light energy, since this is before the creation of Light. This entity is also called the First Aeon, the Root, the Single Name, and The Form of the Formless. The Son contains all of the qualities of the Father, but in a circumscribed form. In today's lingo we would call the Son a holographic representation of the Father, where a small fragment perfectly emulates the larger image. You could think of the Father as the ocean, and the Son as a big bucket of ocean water. It's the same fluid. And if the bucket remains immersed in the ocean, then not only is the water within and without the bucket identical, the ocean continues to fully contain the bucket of water.

The Tripartite Tractate describes how the Son is part of the Father, and then goes on in the same verse to declare the Son as the cause of the Pleroma:

"He exists by the Father having him as a thought--that is, his thought about himself, his sensation of himself and of his eternal being... He possesses power, which is his will. For the moment, however, he holds himself back in silence, he who is the greatest, being the cause of the generation of the members of the All into eternal existence" (56).

By this one verse we can see that the Son is within the Father and he also contains the Fullness, in full agreement with Colossians 2:9.

My second problem with the Nelson notes is their description of aeons. Aeons are not the same as angels--they're more like features or capabilities. The Tripartite Tractate describes them as "the properties and qualities in which the Father and the Son exist" and equates them with the pre-existent Church (58). 

"His offspring, the ones who are, are without number and limit and at the same time indivisible. They have issued from him, the Son and the Father... The Church exists in the dispositions and properties in which the Father and the Son exist... Therefore it subsists in the procreations of innumerable aeons" (59).

While some Aeons are beings with their own self-aware personalities, other aeons are best described as traits and capabilities of the Father and Son.

"...they were unable to know the depth in which they were; nor was it possible for them to know themselves, nor for them to know anything else. That is, they were with the Father; they did not exist for themselves. Rather, they only had existence in the manner of a seed... like a fetus... not yet come into being" (60, 20-35).

Third, the Nelson Study Bible footnote confuses Jesus, the physical incarnation of Christ on Earth, with the eternal spirit of Christ, the first Son of the Father, whose image and dwelling predates the Earthly appearance of Jesus. 

"Now the Savior in fact was a bodily image of something unitary, namely the Fullness" (116).

The Gnostic gospel I've been studying has no quibble with naming the physical person of Jesus Christ as the Lord and Savior of the entire Creation. Lest the wary Christian doubt the Gnostic's gospel, the Tripartite Tractate ends with this eulogy for Jesus Christ:

"...the praise, the power, and the glory, through Jesus Christ, the Lord, the Savior, the Redeemer of all those who are embraced by the mercy of love, and through his Holy Spirit, from now throughout all generations forever and ever. Amen" (138).

And finally, the Nelson editor contends "the fullness of God [that] exists in Christ" ... "contradicts the Gnostic idea of the inherent evil of physical bodies." The editor apparently reasons that if Gnostics claim physical bodies are evil, and Jesus incarnated as a physical body, then Gnosticism would imply that Jesus Christ was evil.

There are a couple of problems with this logic. First, my reading of Gnostic writing reveals that while material reality may have started out as "evil," the situation was quickly rectified when the Son and the Pleroma intervened to establish an "economy" that regulated good and evil inclinations through "repentance." Here's a brief description of that process:

"After conversion followed the remembrance of those who exist and the prayer on behalf of the one who had returned to himself by means of what is good" (81).... "This prayer and supplication helped to make him turn toward himself and toward the Fullness, for their remembrance of him caused him to remember the preexistent ones, and this is the remembrance that calls out from afar and brings him back" (82).

"To those who belong to the remembrance, however, he revealed the thought ... with the intention that it should draw them into a communion with the material. This was in order to provide them with a structure and a dwelling place, but also in order that by being drawn toward evil they should acquire a weak basis for their existence, so that, instead of rejoicing unduly in the glory of their own environment and thereby remaining exiled, they might rather perceive the sickness they were suffering from, and so acquire a consistent longing and seeking after the one who is able to heal them from this weakness" (98, 99).

"The first human, then, is a mixed molding and a mixed creation, and a depository of those on the left and those on the right, as well as of a spiritual Word, and his sentiments are divided between each of the two substances to which he owes his existence" (106).

"What our Savior became, out of willing compassion, is the same as that which the ones for whose sake he appeared had become because of an involuntary passion: they had become flesh and soul, and this holds them perpetually in its grip, and they perish and die... For not only did he assume their death for the ones he had in mind to save, but in addition he also assumed their smallness, to which they had descended when they were born with body and soul; for he let himself be conceived and he let himself be born as a child with body and soul" (114, 115).

Secondly, the very fact that Jesus did incarnate as a mortal man is what made salvation through Christ possible, for it was by the Savior's perfect "error correcting algorithm," superimposed upon an otherwise error-filled humanity, that salvation entered the world. 

I'll end this article with a clear gospel message straight from the Tripartite Tractate regarding exactly what one must come to believe in order to be saved, in case you're curious. 

"... there is no other baptism apart from this one alone, which is the redemption into God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, when confession is made through faith in those names, which are a single name of the gospel, when they have come to believe what has been said to them, namely that they exist. From this they have their salvation, those who have believed that they exist. This is attaining in an invisible way to the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in an undoubting faith" (127, 128).

That seems to be the underlying core of the Gnostic salvation message. No other arcane rituals are needed; no gnosis other than believing that the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit (the Fullness) existed before you. Other ancient gnostic texts claim that this is the true essence of the gospel that Jesus preached. 

Keep in mind that these are the very texts considered so distracting by the early church Fathers that they were buried in the Egyptian desert in the 4th century AD to protect them from being burned as the work of heretics, keeping them safe until their reemergence in 1945. The cat is definitely out of the bag now.

Okay, back to the Pleroma. In case you haven't guessed, the Fullness is where we all wind up eventually. By the end of the universe, most everyone's souls will have come on board Team God, so to speak, and then the fruit of the Pleroma will have returned home to the fold, to live happily ever after amidst the unending joy and love of the Fullness, all tucked up inside the Son who lives inside the Father.

"Once the redemption had been proclaimed, the perfect human [the Savior] immediately  received knowledge so as to return swiftly to his unity, to the place from which he came. Joyfully he returned back to the place from which he had originated, the place from which he had flowed forth. His limbs, however, needed a school... until all the limbs of the body of the Church would be united in one place and would attain the restoration together... so that the Fullness obtains its redemption" (123, 124).

A Simple Explanation of Gnostic Cosmology

Notice: There is now a separate blog dedicated to the New Gnostic Gospel. You can get there by clicking here. This was the original mapping of the new Gnostic Gospel. These concepts have been more colorfully illustrated, although the original mapping still holds up. You may find all of this in its most simple form in my book, The Gnostic Gospel Illuminated.

Since people are still landing on and reading this post, let me tell you that this has been laid out and beautifully illustrated in "The Gnostic Gospel Illuminated" book. 

I also have a podcast now dedicated to fully explaining all of these Gnostic concepts in Simple Explanation form. click here to go to Gnostic Insights

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Here's a first look at what I've been working on lately [back in 2015]. I'll be writing an article about the Gnostic gospels soon. Meanwhile, I thought you might enjoy these first fruits. 

Gnostic Cosmology according to the Tripartite Tractate, by Cyd Ropp, Ph.D.

These diagrams are my visual representations of the "Tripartite Tractate." The Tripartite Tractate is one book of the collection known as the Nag Hammadi scriptures that were discovered buried in the Egyptian desert in 1945. The Nag Hammadi texts were buried sometime in the 3rd century by monks who sought to preserve and protect them from those who wanted to weed them out as heresies as they designed the official shape of the Christian religion. 

After studying the Tripartite Tractate, I can see why the early Pope did not want this to make it into the Bible.  For one thing, the Christ figure, the "Son of God," is not all perfect and all powerful, as portrayed in the Christian Bible; matter of fact, Logos is directly implicated in the Fall. For another thing, salvation is a personal, mystical affair conferred directly by the Father through Logos, not something conferred by preaching or baptism. Thirdly, the cosmology presented here makes clear that those who, shall we say, struggle for righteousness against a sinful world are not necessarily doing God's work, but are caught in an endless war against the "evil doers," and have themselves fallen into some sort of earthly death trap. 

As I said, the complete article is underway. Meanwhile, for those of you who want to get started, here it is in picture form. On the big poster above, start at the upper left corner and read clockwise. Our earthly situation is portrayed in the middle of the diagram. Salvation and the end of the world comes in the form of the pyramid at the lower left. Below are various sections of the diagram presented on their own. If you have already been studying Gnostic cosmology, these diagrams will clarify various terms and activities. If you haven't already been studying this, then these diagrams will be super confusing so don't worry about it. All will be revealed in good time. 

In terms of A Simple Explanation, this cosmology begins prior to "in the beginning..." and proceeds through the formation of Units of Consciousness and the appearance of our physical universe, and concludes with the final collapse of the universe.  It also takes place during the life cycle of each and every Unit of Consciousness, as it is a Fractal Pattern that repeats itself over and over again. Those of you who have read A Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything will recognize the role of the hierarchical distribution and the role of toroidal flow in the final reorganization of creation.  

The First Glory, The Son of the Father. First differentiation after the Undifferentiated Unity of the Metaversal Father.

The Second Glory. The Son has realized it is comprised of many traits of the Father. These traits are called "aeons" in Gnostic terminology. When they're all grouped together they are called the Fullness, or the All. Many differentiations but total harmony. Once these traits are named, they fall out of undifferentiated harmony and rearrange themselves into the pyramidal hierarchy depicted below.

The Fruit of the Third Glory is the offspring of the All in perfect arrangement of hierarchy. This stage in creation is known as the First Order of Powers. Everyone and everything knows its place and is happy.  The final Aeon to arrive at the top of the pyramid, known in the Tripartite Tractate as "Presumptuous Thought," looks down at the hierarchy and sees them all arranged underneath him. This gives that Aeon the idea that he is in charge of the pyramid. He reaches upward to reinsert the pyramid into the Metaverse. This is done without authorization or position. This results in The Fall.

The Fall tumbles the pyramid of Aeons out of arrangement. They Fall into confusion, Chaos. They are dispersed and alone for the first time, cut off from each other and the All. This is now called the Deficiency, and the Imitation. Logos panics and abandons the Imitation and retreats back to the All. God the Father also retreats in horror from the Deficiency, which throws up a Boundary containing the Imitation. Logos and the All try to rescue their abandoned children by praying for them and thus giving them the Remembrance of Who and What they used to be, before the Fall.

The prayers of Logos and the All results in the Second Order of Powers. There are now two types of creatures: those of the Deficiency who have no belief in who or what came before, and those of the Remembrance, who have come to themselves through "Repentance" and "Conversion" and recall their fellow Aeons and their place with the Father in the Fullness. Rather than rejoining Logos and the All, those of the Remembrance choose to do battle with those of the Imitation. They are locked in an endless righteous War where no one can win.

 Release from the Endless War comes by intervention of the Father and the Fullness working together. They produce the Living Image of the All and the Father--the Christ. The Christ places himself upon the Lost like a garment that restores perfection and fills the Lost with inexpressible Joy, giving them the Logos that enables them to detach and dispel delusion. This results in the Third Order of Powers--the Aeons of the Images--that now carry within themselves the Seed of the Word.

The final Order of Creation is called The Economy and The Consolidation. All three types of creatures are represented: those of the imitation, those of the remembrance, and those who have been redeemed by Christ. This drawing is a pyramidal shaped "core sample" of creation. The small figure at the lower right is a cutaway view of creation, with the center of the donut mapping to the top of the pyramid.