What is the demiurge in Gnosticism? It is basically the lord of the world, the personification of matter and the monad of the material sphere, through this it gave birth to the other seven planetary spheres which are called the archons or governors.
Yaldabaoth being Saturn represents the outer boundary of the solar system (from what was astrologically known at the time) and that all the other planets within were conceived as having an ascending order of power, this is why Cronus; for example, being the powerful God was the one who devours his own sons is symbolic as the God of Saturn and also Satan; being associated with Saturn because it is the morning star, the shining one, the one which pervades and is of first light.
Like lucifer; Yaldabaoth and his six sons were rebels and wanted to establish a kingdom against God, the reason why you have this God in the first place is because it is the son of goddess Sophia who resembles regenerative wisdom:
Manly P Hall writes in his book: ‘The Wisdom of the Knowing Ones: Gnosticism: the Key to Esoteric Christianity’:
“Sophia Achamoth, the generative wisdom of the world was lured into the abyss by beholding her reflection in the deep. Through union with the darkness, she gave birth to a son – Laldabaoth, the child of chaos and the egg. Sophia Achamoth, being herself a spiritual nature, suffered horribly from her contact with matter, and after an extraordinary struggle, she escaped out of the muddy chaos which had threatened to swallow her up”
The Gnostic text is very mythological which attracts me to it because it means it is very psychological and extendable when it comes to meaning through story and allegory, thus, the paragraph which I have just previously displayed is comparatively symbolic to the myth of Narcissus because through Sophia’s reflection, which she is lured into, she in a fashion of subjectivism produces what you could call a psychological narcissistic complex in relation not only to her reflection but to that which the ego uses to feed its narcissistic identity which would be matter and the material, and this is one way I see Yaldabaoth, similar to the God of MATERIAL wealth: Mammon.
This is where we get the neo-liberal consumerist or consumer culture link because, the question arises: what are companies and people like Jeff Bezos and amazon doing exactly? They are enacting the structure and intent of the Demiurge, to imprison man through/within matter and the material world, these consumerist corporations want individuals to fulfil the desires that the psychological complex of self-centred material interest craves, which in fulfilment; serves the Narcissistic identity.
Therefore, the best way to materialise and commodify the human soul is by developing a consumer culture where you are imprisoned within matter and the material world, this is the unfulfillable desire portrayed by material wealth equivalent to the gnostic demiurge, especially when you realise that it is the global corporations which want to destroy any other kind of unique, independent and culturally rich/valuable competitor which is much smaller then them, but, what Gnostics wanted is still relevant to today and that is what is called: Gnosis, meaning knowledge based on experience, this is to attain spiritual divine knowledge which is beyond and outside the imprisoned material body, religious salvation for the Gnostics becomes one of spiritual gnosis and experience, not confession of ones sins to the Christian priest.
For the Gnostics Soter Christos is the high priest, thus, the deprivation of Gnosis (experienced knowledge) is not what people want but the reverse for it is that which brings meaning to such a life, this video/article, for example, is an extension of personal Gnosis, some kind of spiritual knowledge and that is how I at the moment personally conceive God, that roughly God IS Gnosis, that which expands the personal conscious life through realisation and manifestation, the more gnosis that you acquire through whatever means of experience, the more your awareness of consciousness expands which leads to a further understanding of what you could call a higher conception of the transcendent divinity, this is symbolic of the ladder in all religious depictions even if you look at Robert Fludds alchemical drawing of the ladder each step is a property of experience to reach the heavens:
- sensus
- imagination
- ratio
- intellectus
- intellegen
- verbum
Even if you look at blake’s painting of Jacob’s ladder with the helical spiral stair case which is very symbolic and something I’l talk about another time.
Manly P Hall writes from the same book:
“The Gnostics held that human nature mirrors the duality found in the world, in part it was made by the false creator and in part it consists of the true god. Within the human dwells a divine spark, a spirit that is older than the created world and all in it. Much of the time we are ignorant of the divine spark resident within us. To awaken to the recognition of this presence involves overcoming powerful obstacles which seem to be built into our own nature and into the environment within which we exist. Gnostic wisdom has often alluded to the possibility that these obstacles may in some way be connected with the powers that manage certain aspects of the universe, and whose dominion over us might be threatened by our Gnosis.
Death releases the divine spark from its lowly prison, but such release may be only temporary unless liberating knowledge has come to the human while still on earth”
What we can conclude is that this is a psychological and external battle with your surroundings for attaining gnosis, what holds one down from the qualitative development is the quantitative supremacy, this is the will that is forwarding the objectifying nature of degrading, material consumer culture, a culture which within its own continuous desire for consumption reduces the value of everything because its fundamental premise is not based on maintaining intrinsic value but reducing something with label: “product” for commercialisation. This is scary continuous prospect because what comes after that on the globalised, cultural, collective level?When you have commercialised the soul of man: Barbarism, cultural barbarism in relation to the product, the cultic value sucked out because of a form of nihilism which I think Mark Fischer talked about in relation to capitalism which thus inevitably leads to something like a ‘consumer doomer’ where all the reality that lived within belief and faith has turned to simple disbelief, negation or a sort of person with outside viewer arrogance and perceived superiority with their deconstructive analysis which is the human imitation of a machine, deconstruction/reconstruction the quantitive, analytic machine.
The moral of the story from my perspective with relation to Gnosticism and the Demiurge is that global consumerist corporations which you know; are in their thousands are SOUL EATERS, maybe even psychological emanations of the demiurge, but, what would that be or mean? In terms of psychological types the Gnostics split people into three types: the Hyletic’s would be the ones who would project the Demiurge into the world through materialistic, earthbound interest, on the opposite side of the spiritual scale you would have the Pneumatic’s who want spiritual gnostic liberation which I guess are the people who watch/read this channel/site, but then again, I don’t like how that such a thing is a cemented label, its kind of like saying that you can’t be on a process of enlightenment or you cannot have a spiritual epiphany of some kind that will take you out of a such-an-such framework.
“Gnosticism looks upon men and women as gods and goddesses who ahve forgotten who they are. Humans are caught in a predicament. Humans are caught in a predicament where in the limitations imposed by physical existence are combined with a triple ignorance: ignorance of our origins, of our true nature, and of our ultimate destiny. it is from this predicament that the gnostic aspires to be freed by Gnosis.”
*WATCH THE VIDEO TO LISTEN TO THE UBERBOYO (Steafan) FEATURE
Thoughts on Thinking 