The Infinity Working (Part 11)
In the atheist Fransesca Stavrakopoulou’s God: An Anatomy (p. 415), the author describes the biblical God in blasphemous terms of Him being an egregore in the following excerpt:
The Bible is bunkum. Its God is dead. At least, that’s what myriad thinkers and writers have told us. Since the Enlightenment, prominent Western intellectuals have not only rendered the biblical God lifeless, but redacted him to a mere phantom, conjured by the human imagination. And yet the God of the Bible looks nothing like the deity dissected and dismissed by modern atheism. The God killed off by the rationalist intellectuals of Western philosophy and science is not to be found in the Bible. Their dead deity is a post-biblical, hybrid being, a disembodied, science-free Artificial Intelligence, assembled over the course of two thousand years from selected scraps of ancient Jewish mysticism, Greek philosophy, Christian doctrine, Protestant iconoclasm and European colonialism. In the contemporary age, this composite being has become a god who forgot to create dinosaurs and failed to account for evolution; a god who allows cancer to kill children, but hates abortion; a god who is everywhere and sees everything, but remains absent and says nothing. But the modern God of the West and ancient God of the Bible are very different beings.
This is exactly how the Demiurge is conceived through the anguished thoughts of the fallen Sophia as Ioan P. Couliano explains in The Tree of Gnosis (p. 78-79):
Among Coptic gnostic texts, two seem to be particularly important in so far as the Sophia myth is concerned: AJ (the Apocryphon of John) and PS (Pistis Sophia). In AJ, Sophia is guilty of thinking without a partner, and her thought first becomes an image and then a terrifying being, the lion-headed dragon Ialdabaoth, chief Archon and Demiurge of the lower world. His meaningless actions bring about Sophia’s confusion and finally her repentance.
In other words, the Demiurge is the “egregore” or thought form of Sophia-Achamoth! Not only is Sophia capable of such feats but also the Demiurge himself as he has the power to duplicate his astral form. Just as Ion Culliano explains in Tree of Gnosis (p. 95) the Pistis Sophia goes on in greater detail on how the material universe was produced by “excruciated” or even “black” light. The text speaks of the Great Archon, tyrant of all cosmic tyrants, called “Adamas”. But another heavenly Ruler, third among the Triple Powers (tridynamoi), bears the name Authades, the Arrogant—another title of the Demiurge. Cullinao goes on to state: “Authades emanates a lion-headed force to steal Pistis-Sophia’s spiritual energy. After having swallowed her Light-dynamis, an ambiguous metaphor for rape, the lion-headed monster is able to duplicate himself, producing Ialdabaoth, another demon made of Fire and Darkness.” Here is what the Pistis Sophia (1. 31-32) has to say about all this:
lt happened now after this she looked down. She saw the power of light in the parts below, and she did not know that it was that of the triple-powered Authades. But she thought that it was from the light which she bad seen from the beginning in the height, which was from the veil of the Treasury of the Light.
And she thought to herself: “I will go to that p/ace without my partner, and take the light, and create of it for myself aeons of light, so that I shall be able I to go to the Light of Lights which is in the highest height.” Now as she was thinking these things, she came forth from her place in the thirteenth aeon, and she came out to the twelve aeons. The archons of the aeons persecuted her, and they were angry with her, because she had thought to have greatness. However, she came forth from the twelve aeons, she came to the places of the Chaos. And she made her way to the light-power with a lion-face in order to swallow it.
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