Origination
of Matter (and
Humans)
from The Gnostic
Religion
by Hans Jonas, The
Valentinian Speculation
After the
Mother had thus passed through all
the passions and, barely
emerged, had turned around in
supplication to the Vanished light
of Christos, the Aeons took pity on
her,
and since Christos
himself would not again leave the
Pleroma they sent "the common
fruit" of the Pleroma, Jesus, to be
the consort of the outer Sophia
(he being the only one of the Aeons
produced without a spouse) and to
cure her of the passions from which
she suffered in her quest
for Christos.
Accompanying
him were the angels who had been
emanated with him as his escort.
Stepping outside the
Pleroma, he found the Sophia in the
four primary passions: fear, grief,
bewilderment, and supplication, and
he cured her of them by now
imparting to her the "informing" of
knowledge (her previous
"forming" by Christos having been
one of substance only).
Those passions
he separated from her, but he did
not leave them to
themselves as had been done with
those of the upper Sophia; on the
other hand he could not simply
annihilate them, since they
had already become "habitual and
effective states,"
in their own
way eternal,
and peculiar
to the
Sophia.
Therefore he only
detached them from the Sophia, that
is, externalized and solidified
them into independent substances.
Thus, by the
Savior's appearance, on
the one hand is the Sophia freed of
her passions and on the
other hand are the things external
founded;
and thereby the
Savior "potentially" brings on (makes
possible) the subsequent
demiurgical creation.
From
incorporeal affection and accidence
he turned the passions into matter, which
was still noncorporeal;
but then he imparted to them the
capacity and natural tendency to
enter into compounds and form bodies,
so that two types of
substance originated: the bad from
the passions, the susceptible
from the turning back.
And the
Achamoth (Sophia), freed from her affections,
joyfully "received" the sight of the
lights around the Savior,
i.e., of his escorting angels, and
from this conception brought forth
pneumatic fruit in their image.
This
is the origin of the
pneumatic element in the lower
world. (Compiled from Irenaeus,
Exc. Theod.,
and Hippolytus.)
Editor's Note: This is the
origin of the human spark (pneuma)
beings on the
material
earth.
Humans in
material
bodies are
the emanated
conception
of Sophia
using the
escorting
angels as
the image to
be emulated. Humans
are
therefore
made in the
image of the
escorting
angels of
Jesus.
The Apocryphon of John says the
following about the origin of humans:
"And from the foreknowledge of the
perfect mind, through the
revelation of the
will of the invisible Spirit and the
will of the Autogenes, <the> perfect
Man (appeared), the first
revelation, and the truth.
It is he
whom the
virginal Spirit called Pigera-Adamas,
and he placed him over the first
aeon with the
mighty one, the Autogenes, the
Christ, by the first light Armozel;
and with him are
his powers. And the invisible one
gave him a spiritual, invincible
power.
And he spoke and glorified and
praised the invisible Spirit,
saying, 'It is for thy
sake that everything has come into
being and everything will return to
thee. I
shall praise and glorify thee and
the Autogenes and the aeons, the
three: the
Father, the Mother, and the Son, the
perfect power.'.
And grace belongs to the light-aeon
Armozel, which is the first angel. And there
are three
other aeons
with this
aeon: grace,
truth, and
form.
Wisse translation; derived from all
four known
manuscripts
of
The Apocryphon of John.
Humans were placed over the first
angel Armozel in the first aeon of grace, truth and form. So
humans were emanated higher than angels but lower than Christ and
they were given an invincible spiritual power by God the
Father.
The next time we fall into the
three lower emotions of fear (anxiety,
worry, panic), grief (sadness,
loneliness) and bewilderment
(confusion, feeling lost) we can remember our Divine origin, our Divine
emanation making us gifted with an invincible spiritual power by
God the Father.
This remembering is the
repentence, the turning to the Divine, the fourth emotion
that leads to the fourth realm of pleroma or
pneuma, not the lower psychic, intellectual or bodily
realms, all of which are in
ignorance of our Divine Glory and Grace.
The
just god is jehova or yaldaboath and he rules the world with
justice but not Mercy which is from God. An eye for an eye is the law
of yaldaboath, but Christ taught us to turn the other cheek and
not strike back in vengeance, knowing that violence never
solves anything, only creating more violence and bloodshed.
Christ is the direct emanational
father of humans, with the virginal Spirit or
God the
Father
presiding
over the
emanation
through his
son Christ. God the virginal Spirit names the
first Human, Adam or Adamas. Humans were immaculately emanated
by God the virginal Spirit and Christ.
The light angels with Jesus must
be the human emanations. So Sophia imitates the human angel Forms to
create the lower humans on earth, while the higher humans still
remain in the pleroma.
Adam was given Eve as his partner and
they both incarnated through Sophia into their lower human forms.
Each human on earth then would have a partner
on earth as
did Adam and
Eve.
Even if one does not have an
opposite gender partner on earth
they are still
eternally
connected to
their
emanated
consort and
will be
reunited in the
pleroma. A
soul mate
would not
equal a
human spirit
mate, since the soul
is given by
Yaldabaoth.
Human procreation was devised by Yaldabaoth to imprison
humans on earth, so souls would be trapped in matter. Souls
are driven by the most powerful force of
sex
attraction
and the
social
demand to
create a
family to
continue life on
earth
instead of
in heaven
i.e the
pleroma.
St.
John of the
Cross and St.
Teresa of
Avila were
friends and
may have
been human
spirit mates as
may have
been St.
Francis and
St. Claire.
This is our human pneumatic or
spiritual
origin, whereas our psychic origin
is from Ialdabaoth as is our physical
body.
The whole key to the salvation of
the pleroma is for the points of light scattered in
humans and physical creation to be gathered
and returned
to the
pleroma or
plen or full
spirit
realm.
So
salvation is not
just about the human sparks or pneuma
(not soul which is psychic, mental,
material sense based), it is about restoring the
integrity of the pleroma with
Sophia, both higher and lower forms, being redeemed to
the pleroma, now with knowledge or
gnow-ledge of the Father's Love and
Mercy due to His saving her from
suffering,separation and death.
Jesus is
the consort of the lower Sophia. But
being immaterial aeons only the sparks
of pneuma could incarnate and not
Sophia or Jesus.
Death by crucification was not needed to
redeem the pneumatic sparks to the pleroma
only the teaching of Christ Jesus,
higher and lower, was needed and it was
transmitted to John the baptist on
the Jordan river.
That is when John is
reborn to the pleroma realm and
Christ Jesus talks to John and tells him what
to teach the people lost in matter.
John's message according to the Essenes
is a natural diet and a natural,
holistic lifestyle.
John instructed them
to fast and pray and eat a living
water rich diet of fruits and
vegetables and cultured milk because
this was eating from the tree of knowledge
of good and evil and not from the
tree of life or biological
material existence as promoted by
Ialdabaoth.
Good and evil is to be known,
what is good and what is evil,
because there is a definite dualism
between Good, the Father and evil or
ignorance of
the Father.
Evil can
mean a God
energy veil
or e veil. Good is a
spiritual quality and its lack is
ignorance of Good.
There is
Absolute Good and that is God the
Good. Only God can be absolutely good,
the perfect Good, so therefore we have
emanations that degenerate slightly from the
Source. This is the origin of the
ignorance and not knowing of the Good God.
Sophia was the farthest emanation
from God being the 30th and the last, so
she wanted to know the Father for
herself and for the rest of the aeons in the
pleroma. But God is unknowable
because to
know God
completely
would mean
you are
equal to
God.
C. G. Jung and Alan Watts
both believed that there was no
ultimate Good and evil i.e.
ignorance of the Good Father and that
everything was relative even in the
spirit realm, all being a mixture of good and
evil.
Jung based his whole
psychological system of the psyche
or soul on the gnostic text The Seven Sermons to the
Dead which describes an ultimate
being called Abraxas which was both
good and
evil:
“Speak to us
further about the highest god!”
—“Abraxas is the god whom it is
difficult to know. His power is the
very greatest, because man does not
perceive it at all. Man sees the
summum bonum (supreme good) of the
sun, and also the infinum malum
of the devil, but Abraxas he does not see, for he
is undefinable life itself, which is
the mother of good and evil alike.
Abraxas generates truth and
falsehood, good and evil, light
and darkness with
the same word in the same deed.
Therefore Abraxas is truly the
terrible one. He is
the sacred wedding; He is love and the murder of love; He is the holy one and his
betrayer.” — from
The Seven Sermons to the Dead
The depiction of Abraxas is that
of a crow's head with its crown or comb and wattle like
beard similar to a lion's mane,
besides looking like the head of the bird
god Horus of the Egyptians, and it
had the body of a serpent or snake. It calls to mind yaldabaoth with
a lion face and serpent body.
This so called gnostic text
is supporting the ideas of
yaldabaoth who is in the middle realm of ignorance, of
psyche, between matter and spirit or pneuma. Yaldabaoth is a mix of good and
evil being a psychic being which is
between the Good pneuma realm and the
completely ignorant material
realm.
Jung, a
student of
Freud, based
his whole
psychological
system on
the psychic,
middle, medium realm because it's
based on
Abraxas the
good and
evil god of
the middle,
psychic
realm.
To enter
the pneuma
realm one
needs to be born
into it,
meeting
their
conscience
and then
stay in that
realm by a
continual daily communion
with that
realm eating a
living water diet or living bread
and living wine diet, which is what is meant when
Christ told about eating his flesh
and drinking his blood. His Spirit was to be
found in fruits and vegetable
plants.
Mani, the Persian-Iranian prophet
expresses this as,
Jesus patibilis,
the "passible Jesus" who "hangs from
every tree," "is served up bound
in every dish," "every day is born,
suffers and dies."
He is
dispersed in all creation, but his
most genuine realm and embodiment seems
to be the vegetable world, that is,
the most passive and the only
innocent form of life.35
Yet at the same time with the active
aspect of his nature he is
transmundane Nous who, coming from above,
liberates this captive substance and
continually until the end of the
world collects it,
i.e., himself,
out of the physical dispersal.
footnote 35 "What is
'the soul that is slaughtered, by
being killed, oppressed, murdered in the enemy'?—What
has been called 'the slaughtered,
killed, oppressed, murdered soul' is the [life]
force of the fruits, the cucumbers
and seeds, which are beaten, plucked, torn to
pieces, and give nourishment to the
worlds of flesh.
Also the wood, when drying up, and
the garment, when getting old, will
die: they too are a part of the total 'murdered, slaughtered
soul'"
(Keph. p.
176.
23; 178. 5 ff.).
Christ is the life force in
fruits and vegetables and therefore
to cook them would kill the Christ
Life force which they contain, thus explaining the need for a
living fruit and vegetable diet and also living, raw cultured
milk since the life force is
contained in milk and especially if the bacteria
transform it into a pre-digested food.
Milk is not a product of
the slaughter of the animal and thus is sacred as the hindus
affirm. Thus by eating Life one
becomes one with the Life force of
Christ.
The shadow idea
of Jung does not exist
for the pneuma spark in our human being it only exists in the
psychic part or brain and nervous
system connected to the body or
unconscious autonomic nervous
system.
If we are projecting evil onto another
being and judging them as evil, Jung
is right this is a projection of our psyche and
soma or body and thus we cannot
judge others as totally evil since all
humans have the spark of pneuma.
The anima of male humans
and the animus of female humans is
the androgenous part of their emanated spirit
being derived from Christ and Mind
his consort.
It is also the yearning to find our
human spirit consort, being spirit
of our spirit, eternally united as our emanated
paired, partner consort. The wedding will be the reunion with our
partner human spirit in the pleroma
spirit realm free of the material world
of Yaldabaoth.
Some humans are descendants of
Cain who was the child of yaldabaoth
and eve, and thus they are half
pneuma from eve and half psyche from yaldaboath.
The children of Cain mixed with
the children of Seth (the first
child of Adam and Eve), so there are three
types of humans on earth, the Seth
descended, the Cain descended and the mixed Seth
and Cain descended.
All three have
the spark of pneuma or God, so all
three can achieve salvation and
return to the pleroma spirit realm by learning
and practicing the teaching of
Christ as it was given to John.
Sophia never incarnated like her
human spark offspring and likewise Jesus similarly could also not
incarnate being an aeon or spirit
emanated being. Therefore John was sent to
tran-scribe (be a scribe to Christ) the message of Jesus
Christ.
Some of yaldabaoth's created angels did
hear the calling and liberated themselves from the bondage of
the material and psychic world. So,
all humans and even yaldabaoth's
offspring can heed the call of
healing or salvation.
HOW THE
PLEROMA WILL BE RESTORED TO
FULLNESS: THE MARRIAGE
OF SOPHIA AND JESUS AND THE PNEUMA
SOULS WITH THE ANGELS OF JESUS
The spirits
transformed by knowledge rest in the
middle region of the Ogdoad,
where their Mother the Sophia
clothed with them awaits the
consummation of the world. Her own
final salvation takes place
when all the pneumatic elements in
the world have been "formed"
by knowledge and perfected.
Then the
spirits, stripped of
their souls, with their Mother enter
the Pleroma, which becomes the
bridal chamber in which takes place
the marriage of Sophia with
Jesus and that of the spirits with
their bridegrooms, the angels
around Jesus.
With this, the
Fullness is restored in its integrity, the
original breach finally repaired,
the pre-temporal loss retrieved; and
matter and soul, the expression of
the fall, with their
organized system, the world, cease
to exist.
Hans Jonas in The Gnostic Religion
from
the chapter The Valentinian
Speculation
NO ORIGINAL
SIN IN HUMANS
Nor was there
ever an "original sin" of man, a
guilt of the human soul:
there was, instead, the
time-preceding guilt of an Aeon, a divine
upheaval, whose reparation in its
course required the creation
of the world and that of man.
Thus
the world, unbeknown to its
immediate author, is for the sake of
salvation, not salvation for
the sake of what happened within
creation and to creation. And
the real object of salvation is the
godhead itself, its theme the
divine integrity.
Hans Jonas in The Gnostic Religion from the chapter The Valentinian
Speculation
THE LAW OF MOSES IS FROM
IALDABAOTH
The writer is
at pains to make it clear from the
outset that the Law of Moses,
though certainly not from the
perfect Father, is neither from
Satan; nor is the world: both are
the work of a god of justice.
Those who attribute creation and
legislation to an evil god are as
much in error as those who ascribe
the Law to the supreme God:
the former err because they do not
know the god of justice,
the latter, because they do not know
the Father of All.
From the
middle position of the
legislator-god follows a middle attitude
toward his Law—which however is not
identical with the whole body of
the pentateuch. The latter contains
three elements: ordinances
from "God," from Moses, and from the
elders.
Those from "God"
again are threefold: the pure
legislation unmixed with evil, which
the Savior came not to abolish but
to make full, because it was still
imperfect (e.g., the decalogue); the
legislation tainted with
badness and injustice, which the
Savior abolished because it was
alien to his nature and that of the
Father (e.g., "an eye for an
eye"); and the legislation symbolic
of things pneumatic and
other-worldly, which the Savior
translated from the literal and sensible to
the spiritual meaning (the ritual
laws).
Hans Jonas in
The Gnostic Religion
from the chapter The Valentinian
Speculation
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