The Infinity Working (Part 19)

Before The Fall, After the Fall

Earlier, we explored how the Tree of Life and the Tree of Knowledge were seen by Gnostics as symbols of their cosmology. These trees represented the Aeons in the Pleroma and the veil or Platonic limit separating them from the material world, marked by illusion, imperfection, time, and flux.

The Stauros (Cross) signifies a principle of separation and limit, dividing entity from non-entity, being from non-being, and Light from Darkness. It was seen as synonymous with the Logos and represented victory in the doctrine of Christus Victor atonement.

The Stauros also serves as a Limit-Setter and Guide, leading the initiated soul from the underworld to the zodiacal cosmos, to the eighth heaven where Sophia dwells, and finally to the Heavenly Cross, acting as a gateway into the Triadic God. The Logos is established as a “door” or “gate” into Paradise for the saved souls (John 10:9).

This region was also called the “suburbs”, a frontier or the barrier, demarcating the boundary between the worlds. The term “suburb” is also used in a Peratic text that the Church Father Hippolytus quotes at length called The Suburbs up to the Aither in the Philosophumena or the Refutation of All Heresies. In Plato’s Timaeus, he refers to the soul-stuff of the universe in terms of two circular strips joined together like the Greek letter chi (X). Similarly, tau, the last letter of the Phoenician and Old Hebrew alphabets, is shaped like a cross, and was popularly held to be a protective emblem of supernatural power. Crosses were also said to be used by Roman General Marcius Turbo’s forces in the first century to carry their food and clothing.

In Plato’s radical dualism, he thought that matter and the Demiurge were uncreated and co-existed eternally with the world of forms or the eternal archetypes. And he believed that matter and the forms were eternally separated by what he called the “divided line.” In Ephesians 2:19, the invisible cross is represented as bestriding the cosmos in terms of “the breadth, and length, and depth, and height” of the love of Christ, which surpasses knowledge.