r/Gnostic

While not technically Gnostic, Jungs ideas very much were Gnostic in spirit. Here is a sermon on Psalm 14 and a psychological approach to it given at our church on Sunday.

Hello! I’ve been recently getting into Gnosticism, but I got a question I can’t seem to figure out.
From what I can understand, Monad emanated aeons, who are described as being androgynous. The aeons form the pleroma through their syzygy, which is described as being male-female?
In the tale of Sophia and the demiurge, she tries to emanate on her own, without her male counterpart, in which the demiurge comes from. This just seems to represent a parallel to the tale of Eve. I can’t seem to understand why monad emanates female-male aeons, when there could be no female-male, just aeon? I hope my point/question gets across.

Because despite Sophia being androgynous, it seems that she’s mostly referred to as mainly feminine, so it just seems like a way to make femininity seem inferior again?

I recently started exploring Gnosticism, and it feels like a missing puzzle piece I did not even know I needed. If I were to try and believe in the Bible, then Gnostic texts make way more sense than mainstream Christianity.

1. The Problem With Yahweh

Growing up in Christianity, I always struggled with how the Old Testament God (Yahweh) could be considered “good.” He is jealous, vengeful, demands sacrifices, condones genocide, and seems more like a cosmic dictator than a loving father.

Then I came across Gnostic Christianity and the concept of Yaldabaoth, also called the Demiurge. Gnosticism teaches that Yahweh is not the true God. He is a false creator who enslaved humanity in the material world. He believes he is the one true God, but he is actually an ignorant, arrogant ruler who created an illusion of power. • In the Gospel of Judas, Jesus laughs at the disciples for worshiping Yahweh, implying they have been deceived. • In the Apocryphon of John, Yaldabaoth (Yahweh) declares himself the only God, but a divine voice tells him he is mistaken.

For the first time, this actually explained the contradictions in the Bible. The Old Testament God being cruel and the New Testament God being “loving” makes no sense in Christianity, but it makes sense in Gnosticism because they are not the same being.

2. The World as a Prison

Another thing that never sat right with me in Christianity was the idea that God created a “perfect” world but then blamed humans when everything went wrong.

Gnosticism completely reframes this. • The world was never perfect. It was created flawed because it was made by the Demiurge. • The material world is a prison that keeps our divine souls trapped. • Jesus came not to die for sins but to wake people up to the fact that they are trapped and help them return to the true divine source.

This explanation makes more sense than Christianity’s view that a perfect God somehow created an imperfect world and then punished humans for it.

3. Capitalism and the Demiurge

As I dug deeper, I realized Gnosticism also explains why capitalism thrives. The material world is a deception built on false value systems, artificial scarcity, and control structures. • The Demiurge (Yaldabaoth) and the Archons rule over the material world, keeping people distracted by wealth, power, and meaningless desires. • Capitalism fits perfectly into this system by trapping people in endless cycles of work, consumption, and financial dependency. • The pursuit of money and status is like worshiping the false gods of the material world rather than seeking higher truth. • Corporations, governments, and religious institutions all act as Archons, enforcing the Demiurge’s rule and keeping people spiritually asleep.

This hit me hard. Christianity often justifies capitalism, treating wealth as a sign of divine favor. Prosperity Gospel, anyone? But Gnosticism reveals that material success is actually a distraction from true enlightenment.

4. Leaving Christianity, But Finding Truth in Gnosticism?

I do not believe in Christianity anymore, but if I had to accept any version of Jesus, it would be the Gnostic Jesus. • The one who came to free us from the false god, not serve him. • The one who told us the Kingdom of God is inside us, not in a church or religious institution. • The one who laughed at blind faith and encouraged hidden knowledge.

I know that most Gnostic texts were destroyed or hidden by the early Church, which only makes me more curious. It feels like Christianity was shaped to serve the Demiurge, while Gnosticism was erased because it actually empowered people to think for themselves.

5. Thoughts?

I am still processing a lot of this, but I am curious. Has anyone else here gone down the Gnostic rabbit hole? Does it make more sense to you than Christianity? Also, what do you think about the connection between capitalism and the Demiurge?

Would love to hear other perspectives!

Perhaps Chaos itself described by the Greeks?

I've heard it said that at the fall of Atlantis Zeus himself called upon that chaos to punish mankind with Pandora the first woman and her box.

Could the contents of that box have been the false matrix, that frequency, we know and love today?

King of Israel, Builder of the temple, Enslaver of demons, "The Wisest Man to Ever Live," and a traitor to Yahweh/Yaldabaoth.

I wonder how a gnostic views him. Yes, he was known as a man who was loyal to the Yahweh/Yaldabaoth, but he also was said to have enslaved demons to help him build the temple, and he also eventually came to worship foreign gods.

I don't think a Gnostic, regardless of the specific gnostic school, would say that Solomon had gained gnosis or was ever close to achieving it. But I could be wrong. I would also like to know how a gnostic interprets Solomon 'hiring' demons to build the temple. Did he summon archons? Different spirits? Other deities? And I suppose this enters a different question entirely, the question being how do gnostics see other gods, like those in the Egyptian pantheon, the Mesopotamian Pantheon, and even religions like Shintoism and Buddhism?

>Yeshua said,
Whoever blasphemes against the father
will be forgiven,
and whoever blasphemes against the son
will be forgiven,
but whoever blasphemes against the holy spirit will not be forgiven,
either on earth or in heaven.

When I was first learning about Gnosticism, I was surprised to find this in the Thomas sayings.

Growing up attending a fundamentalist school, I had been told that similar sayings in the canonical gospels regarding "blasphemy against the Holy Spirit" were warnings against turning away from YHWH and Yeshua, and that to be "not forgive" means to suffer forever in Hell. It never quite sat right with me; I thought that the Son of God would have given such a warning in very clear and direct language.

Fast forward a quarter of a century and here is a similar expression in Thomas saying 44.

I'm perplexed and to be honest, at this point, if Yeshua says that blasphemy is an unforgivable sin, I don't even know how I would commit this sin if I wanted to.

I've been told that we are fragments/sparks of Sophia/Barbelo/The Monad, and thus, we are divine beings.

I've also been told that the Holy Spirit also refers to Sophia/Barbelo/The Monad within us.

If that is true, then "blasphemy against the Holy Spirit", for me, would mean "blasphemy against myself", which doesn't quite seem right to me.

And besides, if I carry a spark of the The Monad, that's the father, right? So how would it even make sense to regard The Monad as being separate from that.

And furthermore, what does the word "forgiven" mean who is the one providing the forgiveness and what is being forgiven?

In fundamentalism, "forgiven" in similar expressions means held in high regard and excused from punishment in Hell.

In fundamentalism, YHWH is the one providing the forgiveness.

In fundamentalism, "sins", both in this life and the Original Sin, are what is being forgiven.

There's a lot to unpack here, and I'd like to know how you interpret it.

The key word is *you*. I want to know what *you* think, not just what you might think is considered canonical.

I occasionally see people refer to Chnoubis gems as gnostic and I would like to correct that with this post. Also just to have this explanation in the form of a sharable post people can be directed to (no matter if it's me or someone else doing the directing).

To begin, I am not a scholar of antiquity, so everything I say is amenable to that kind of correction. However I feel confident saying that I know more than people who just give them one look and say "Yaldabaoth amulet??" because I have done some academic research on it. Specifically, as a part of my assignment for a history of magic course I was taking the past semester. In case you want to just read that, here it is. In case the link has expired just ask for me to transfer it again in the comments or via dms. Essentially, I argue that the author of the Apocryphon of John got the idea that the creator of the world is a lion-headed serpent through said gems rather than the gem designs stemming from gnostic ideas. This post won't just be recounting arguments from the assignment because I don't think all of them are relevant to my point here however.

If you don't know, Chnoubis (χνουβις) gems are a class of amulets that come from the late Roman empire (here's a selection of them just for example). They depict a radiant lion-headed serpent and are correlated with the aforementioned name as well as a SSS, sometimes a ZZZ symbol. The material is often Chrysoprase in this case but all magical gems take semi-precious stones as their material base. The functions of magical gems mostly vary between erotic (making someone fall in love with you) and medical/health related. Thankfully in the case of Chnoubis gems the function is pretty clear from the sometimes accompanying inscriptions, e.g. "digest" is put forward as a command. Chnoubis gems were supposed to help the user with any problems in the abdomen, be that the stomach or the uterus. It is good to keep in mind the concreteness of these practices not just through their function but also their physicality: these were material objects you would have to wear (along with maybe reciting a spell).

I think the idea that it could be the other way around (gnostic motif->magical gems produced based on it) is based on a kind of public misperception that's perpetuated in gnostic circles. That being that the lion-headed snake motif is common. It isn't. The AoJ is literally the only instance of it I could find. A lot of other cosmogonic texts say that the demiurge is lion-like in some way but there's no snake-main body detail mentioned. So I think people get the wrong impression that Chnoubis gems are gnostic because AoJ is the most well-known gnostic text and the image of the demiurge as a lion-headed snake is spread quite a bit through images and memes online. When you keep this in mind it becomes a lot more difficult to think that ONE text, still pretty obscure in virtue of being Christian and about some pretty esoteric stuff while it's still the second century, could have this big of an impact. But this is asymmetric, so it's actually quite easy to think that the author of the AoJ could get the idea from novel medical/magical technology.

Anyway, I based a lot of my research on the work of W. M. Shandruk (A computational approach to the study of magical gems, the link by which I accessed the pdf seems to be defunct now so I have added it to the swisstransfer) and it gives an explanation of the elements of Chnoubis gems through Graeco-Egyptian (mostly Egyptian) pagan religion which I found quite convincing. Their idea is that the elements of the first decan of Leo (Charchnoumis (χαρχνουμις)), a lion-headed goddess) and the third decan of cancer (Chnoumis (χνουμις), a vertical serpent crossed by three snakes horizontally) (these specific depictions are from the Seti I B family) got combined with the god Khnum (commonly rendered as Chnoubis in Greek by this period) to form Chnoubis as the radiate lion-headed serpent. Shandruk argues for the connection to Khnum on etymological grounds but I argue further that based on the functions of the gems it would've made sense to appeal to Khnum (since he is associated with creation and the womb). At any rate, the elements on the gems can all be linked to Khnum and the decanal gods. The only exception is ZZZ since, Shandruk argues, that might be a cipher for the tetragrammaton (in paleo-hebrew). But this element is also not that strongly statistically correlated to the Chnoubis cluster.

I think it's this association to decanal deities and a creator god that made the author of the AoJ associate Chnoubis with the demiurge. The figure was already linked to creation and astral determinism (over organic bodies especially) in its original pagan context, so all the author did was further link it with the creator god of Genesis (maybe made more likely by the ZZZ). That's why I think the author of the AoJ vilifies Chnoubis in the text (through its likeness rather than name). They are using their theology and cosmology to associate Chnoubis with the creator of the world (and specifically as the one in Genesis).

I’ve been reading more about Gnosticism, simulation theory, archons, the Demiurge, and how different religions might connect to that whole idea.

One thing I keep seeing in Gnostic discussions is the idea that Yahweh is sometimes interpreted as the Demiurge, or Yaldabaoth, basically a lower creator/ruler figure who claims to be the highest God and demands worship, obedience, fear, submission, and control, rather than being the true Source beyond this material world.

So I started wondering how this applies to Islam.

In Islam, Allah is presented as the supreme God. But from a Gnostic or matrix/simulation perspective, could Allah also be interpreted as the Demiurge/Yaldabaoth in the same way some people interpret Yahweh? Or would Allah be understood differently?

I’m also curious because Islam has a lot of symbolism that people connect to Saturn, the black cube, the Kaaba, ritual circling, submission, and also sometimes moon symbolism. I’ve also seen people connect older deities like Nanna/Sin, the Sumerian moon god, to later religious symbolism, though I’m not sure how strong that connection actually is.

Another question I have is about Muhammad’s role in this kind of interpretation. If Allah were viewed through a Gnostic/Demiurge lens, then what would Muhammad be considered? A prophet of the Demiurge? A channel of that system? A sincere messenger who believed he was receiving divine revelation? Or something else entirely?

So my main question is:

From a Gnostic perspective, would Allah be considered the Demiurge/Yaldabaoth, or is that too simplistic? And if Islam is viewed as an archonic control system, what role would Muhammad play within that framework?

I’m not asking this to insult ordinary Muslims. I’m more interested in the metaphysical/theological angle, the Demiurge, archons, Saturn/moon symbolism, and whether Abrahamic religions are pointing to the same lower creator figure under different names.

I have been tasked by a friend and potential employer to charter a fictional religion for a fictional universe, which is to be based in Gnosticism, (I assume Valentinian, not set in stone yet) Technology, and feature a Pantheon where Lillith features prominently, possibly at the head.

Is anyone aware of traditions that equate Lillith with Sophia? I mean plenty of parallels come to mind but I wonder if this has already been explored.

I hate when fiction is disrespectful to occult traditions, and it almost always is - so I dont want to add to the problem.

Is it just me or does Gnosticism have this stigma forced on it? (Might be controversial but here goes)

I went into reading the Gnostic texts thinking I was going to learn “secret information” and be apart of this “secret club” but reading the actual text… the “secret knowledge” isn’t some kind of “secret society information about the TRUTH” but rather a form of revelation and understanding with the texts offering to help guiding you through it. Take the gospel of Thomas which ISN’T even a direct Gnostic text, it was a Christian texts accused of Gnostic ideas and thrown out, realistically the timeline of the GoT is 50Ce to 140Ce more likely aroundish the timeline of the actual gospels (being lenient 60-95ishCe) but if you look up when it’s written, the search replies and such will say it’s mid late 2nd century with one of the actual reason being it shares some sayings or something, like you ever thought maybe Jesus just said those things and two people recorded it??? Just because it’s said in one book doesn’t mean the other took from it? Anyway

Idk, It’s rather annoying that this practice which teaches people to look within, to connect with the spiritual and divine and to understand oneself is boiled down to “Secret cult! secret cult!”, Does Gnosticism offer “secret knowledge”? Yes, but it isn’t just the knowledge itself which will save you, it’s your reflection, faith and understanding of what it’s saying which will and you know who else was asking people to listen and learn not-thought almost “secret” things and what they learn and understand will save them??? JESUS CHRIST in the 4 GOSPELS!

Eg, defining what is and isn’t gnostic, what books are considered essentially gnostic, how to practice gnosticism (or at least a very solidified variant of it.)?

Either the beliefs would be outlined be theologians or via a democratic vote by gnostics as a whole

I thought it would be beneficial for the growth of the belief if we were to finalise some basic principles of it and organise it better

I do not mean in terms of popularity, job promotions, or money, but rather in terms of better emotional control, understanding why people might do the things they do based on their own beliefs, and consistency in life goals.