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The Gnostic Scriptures Bently Layton, ed. Doubleday. New York, 1987.
Jonas, Hans. The Gnostic Religion: The Message of the Alien God & the Beginnings of Christianity. Beacon Press. (Out of Print)
Sophia is most properly an aspect of the Valentinian School of Gnosticism, of, I believe the third century C.E., based in Alexandria. Sophia, divine wisdom, was the emanation of the (Godhead) that, by her very nature, desired to truly comprehend her Father, the unknowable One, the so-called Alien God. This desire caused discord in the Pleroma (fullness). Because this impossible quest for understanding (absofuckinglutly unknowable, see) disrupted the balance of the One and his emanations, a figure known as the Horos (limit or boundary) cast the desiring portion of Sophia outside of the fullness, into the nothing.
Now, that nothing wasn't so much nothing anymore, as there was something in it. This aborted something is known as Achamoth, or Sophia Achamoth, the lesser Sophia. In the darkness of the comsos, this aborted part of the true Godhead (Oneness-->>Sophia-->>Achamoth) weeped and wailed and laughed and raged. She didn't know where she was, or what she'd been thrown out of, but she felt that she'd been severed from something. From her passions formed the Demiurge, who not knowing his provenance, believed himself the Highest. From what was left of the passions of his unknown mother, the Demiurge shaped the archons, and together with them, the furniture of the cosmos. As all of the raw materials of creation come from Achamoth, they contain a spark of the Godhead. Mr. Unknowable, pitying his poor granddaughter (if no one minds my personifying them), sent another part of himself, the Christ from the Pleroma into the cosmos to save as much of creation as possible, freeing these sparks of divinity to return to our rightful place as part of what's really real.
Fucking Gnostics. All these abstractions. |
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