Political Gnosticism

Only YOU can defeat the Archons.

On the January 17, 2024 Aeon Byte podcast, host Miguel Conner presented a list of the tenets of Gnosticism, which he took from Arthur Versluis’s Magic & Mysticism:

1. A hostile cosmos: gnostic antipathy to nature
2. A demiurge, or ignorant creator responsible for a botched creation and hostile to human spiritual development
3. Dualism: Opposition between the realm of light and the realm of matter
4. An elaborate mythology
5. Myths concerning Sophia (wisdom) and her fall and restoration
6. Belief in a hidden God (not the demiurge/creator)
7. Difficulty of spiritual progress due to the archons or other hostile powers in the cosmos; ignorance of the inherent (fallen) human condition
8. Existence of the ogdoad, or eight spheres (including seven planetary spheres) and possibility of their transcendence
9. The necessity of gnosis, or direct spiritual knowledge from the realm of light.
10. A revealer or redeemer figure to show the way to the realm of light.

I understand that much of this is found in the Nag Hammadi library. A very brief summary from Kurt Rudolph’s Gnosis: The Nature of History of Gnosticism is that the ogdoad (point 8 above) consists of the aforementioned…