Transcription
Perhaps one of the most shocking and at that time scandalous concepts to emerge from the ancient world was the idea that the cosmos around us, this whole world that we live in, was a dreadful prison created by a malevolent being known simply as the Craftsman or the Demiurge. From the pagan philosopher Plotinus to the proto-Catholics, this concept of the evil Creator in our world as a cosmic prison was scorned and attacked from virtually all sides of the intellectual world. And yet, some version of this concept endured deep within Christianity, even reemerging centuries later as Bogomilism and perhaps in the West as Catharism in the Middle Ages.
The origins of the malevolent Demiurge, however, are pretty mysterious, and this episode will dive pretty deep into the origins of the concept in the very crucible of Christianity itself. Their early Christian Jewish polemics will paint the Jewish God simply as the devil, or perhaps even the father of the devil. A concept that would survive into various esoteric forms of Christianity.
Secondly, we're going to explore perhaps the first true systematizer of Christian theology and Christian scripture, Marcion. It would be Marcion that would provide a powerful analysis of the Hebrew Bible to reveal, at least to his mind, mind, that the God of the Hebrew scriptures was a malevolent, wicked, demonic entity, rightly put to shame by the truly divine Christ. Marcion's powerful and sustained arguments that the Creator of the Old Testament was a wicked, murderous, false God, probably, or at least perhaps very well-formed, the theological foundations for the speculative theologies that we now associate with the so-called Gnostics of the ancient world, and especially, especially the complex mythologies of the rise and fall of Sophia and the origins of the horrible Demiurge. Yeah, the of the Apocryphon of John.
Let's explore the origins of the malevolent cosmic Creator in this second installment in our series on the Demiurge. Make sure to subscribe here to Esoterica for weekly explorations of topics in esoteric history. And if you'd like to support, support the work of providing evidence-backed, free, and accessible content like this episode, I'd hope you consider checking out my Patreon or picking up some of the merch on the channel. It's kind of cool black metal themed merch.
But if you're new to the study of esotericism and you want to sort of get your feet wet and get a lay of the land of how to study esotericism, I have a link in the description to my study guide on the topic. And if you're really interested in historical books and topics of the occult and the mystical, you can check out my rare bookstore, Esoteric Rare Books. Again, you can find links to all of those in the description and in the pin comment below.
But now, let's turn to the development of the evil, the wicked Demiurge within the very origins of Christianity itself. I'm Dr. Justin Sledge, and welcome to Esoterica, where we explore the arcane in history, philosophy, and religion.
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As I mentioned in the introduction, this is actually part two of a probably three-part, at least three-part series on the origins and development of the concept of the malevolent Demiurge, or the evil Creator of the cosmos. You may want to check out that first episode along with this one to get a more full picture of the development of all the things we're going to talk about. But a, uh, a little summary from last time to sort of get us back into the conversation.
The concept of the Demiurge creating a less than perfect, though not evil, universe has its origins in Plato's Timaeus. They're a benevolent, benevolent Demiurge forges the cosmos by attempting to impress perfect form onto imperfect matter. Of course, matter being imperfect cannot accept the perfect forms, and thus the world is by definition optimal. It is optimal, but it is inherently less than perfect. It's like a carpenter being given bad lumber, and well, the resulting furniture isn't great. What's not the fault of the carpenter. That's a, that's a problem with the lumber. And thus it is with the world and the Platonic Demiurge.
And in effect, some version of this Iota Muon, or likely narrative as Plato has it, became basically normative in Greek philosophy in the centuries that followed him, in the millennia that followed him. In fact, we'll see shortly, the concept that the gods were uncompromisingly good, but also become normative as well. It simply was the case that to be a God, you had to be absolutely good, at least in the development of what we might call Middle Platonism.
But in the religious polemics between the sizable population of Judea living in Egypt and the indigenous Egyptians living in Egypt in the centuries prior to the turn of the Common Era, it would be the Jewish God, the Israelite God Yahweh, that would be demonized, would undergo the process of demonization by the Egyptians. Recall that central to the Israelite and Judean myth history is a narrative that the Egyptians had enslaved the Israelites in the ongoing process of divine liberation via Moses. Now, that narrative was deep, disturbing to native Egyptians. It painted the Egyptian gods as powerless to this desert God, and it painted the Egyptian leadership as evil, precisely in the period in which Egypt was being colonized by both Greek and Roman forces.
Now, to combat that Exodus narrative, the Egyptians countered that the Israelites were just expelled because they were a bunch of diseased lepers, and that their God Yahweh was in fact the Demonic, donkey-headed God, the God of disorder, the desert chaos, and of course, the God of foreigners. Thus, in this polemic, Yahweh was associated with the Demonic God Set, such that the Jews worshiped a donkey-headed demon, and that became sort of a standard piece of anti-Judean stereotypes in the ancient pagan world. That trope, by the way, would in turn be weaponized against early Christians themselves, at least early on thought of as a sect of Judaism. Most famously depicted in the Alexamenos graffito, a worshipper of Jesus is mocked as worshipping his God, depicting as the crucified Jesus with the infamous donkey head of Set, again associated with the Israelite God.
But this association of the Israelite Creator God Yahweh with the Demonic Egyptian God Set would prove to be a key theological move in the ultimate development of the malevolent Demiurge mythology, made famous again in texts like the Apocryphon of John. Again, I covered all of that in much greater detail in the first episode. So if you want to get into that material, check out that first episode on the Demiurge. Also, you can check out my episode on the Egyptian God Set for a much deeper analysis of the nature and evolution of that frankly very mysterious and very complicated deity.
But to get to those other rather shocking Gnostic myths, we're going to have to turn to the theological and philosophical crucible that was early Christianity. But crucial to understanding the teachings of the historical Jesus and his earliest followers is the apocalyptic mode of Judaism, which the early movement really typified. This apocalyptic form of Judaism was characterized by an interest in cosmogeny or cosmology, events in the primordial past, what is called ex eventu prophecy, often couched in very weird symbolic language, that's when you talk about the present as if it's the future, uh, expressed anxiety about oppression and tribulation, eschatological upheavals, which would include the judgment and eventual fate of both the righteous and the wicked, other-worldly journeys, good versus evil dualism, the intervention into history by a kind of Messianic savior figure, and as Messianic characters as well, got to have some good antichrists if you're going to have good apocalypticism, the structure of the heavens and the hells, the hidden role of angels and demons in worldly affairs, a generally divinely deterministic attitude, which is just to say, things are real bad, but God's in control, so it, it's okay, it's all going to work out, uh, pseudo-anonymous and alleged ancient authorship of texts, and which actually gives the name to this whole religious mode, the revealing, the apocalypses, from the Greek to reveal or to uncover, all of this to reveal all of this stuff to human agents, often through an angelic or otherwise sort of quasi-divine emissary.
But central for the development of the malevolent Demiurge in the Christian context here is precisely that theological dualism I just mentioned. Now, such a Judean theological dualism can already be detected in the highly developed form of the War Scroll, or the War of the Sons of Light versus the Sons of Darkness, composed sometime in the 2nd century BCE, a couple centuries even before the birth of Jesus, and found among the sectarian documents at the Qumran community there, what we now call the Dead Sea Scrolls. Now, I've done a whole episode on the War Scroll if you want to see it as a kind of precursor to something like the Apocalypse of John, but you can check that episode out as well.
But like the Qumran second-century sectarians in their general dispute between the lineages of the Teacher of Righteousness and the Wicked Priest, primitive Christians would also come to employ that very kind of apocalyptic dualism or eschatological dualism in their emerging debates with the Judean religious leadership over the Messianic character of Jesus and kind of how to do Judaism at some level. This is basically the game of "everyone I don't like is the devil," which everyone played and everyone lost. But that's super creative. We still play that game. Everyone I don't like is fascist or communist or woke or whatever.
While the early Jesus movement did gain followers from the Gentile world via the ministry of Paul, Jewish converts from outside of the circle that immediately knew Jesus in his lifetime grew pretty vanishingly small in the early decades of the movement. Further, Jewish authorities were themselves facing a widening social and religious crisis, one that would eventually erupt into the truly apocalyptic Great Revolt in '66 of the Common Era, just a generation following the execution of Jesus. This is all become hostile to what had begun. It was just another Messianic movement. It was just another weird Messianic movement.
But at some point, about a generation into this whole development, the Jewish authorities really had to deal with it. Thus, in the writing of the Gospels, early Christians began to interpolate their own struggles with the Jewish establishment in their lifetime, a generation after Jesus, into those increasingly hostile narratives that they were writing down that became the Gospels. In the earliest Gospel accounts, there are, of course, technical debates over specific legal practices between Jesus and specifically the scribes and the Pharisees, but just them, really. But by the composition of the Gospel of John, around 100 or 90 of the Common Era, the narrative is now transformed such that it is now a contestation, an apocalyptic contestation, between the divine light of Christ and the Jews. The Jews, again, what was probably a minor divergence in Jewish religious practice among early Christians and the early Jewish legal establishment would now go on to become, at least in the mind of those early Christians, an apocalyptic war between the forces of light and those of Satan. In only a couple of generations since the execution of Jesus himself.
The Jewish establishment, for their part, would actually end up doing their own bit of, I don't know, cursing the early emergent Jesus movement by adding a special blessing, blessing the *Birkat HaMinim*, the Blessing of the Heretics, such that the refusal of Jewish Christians to utter it out loud during the Passover cycle would out them as well, heretics.
But this is all really best typified in the narrative found in the Gospel of John, especially chapter 8. Throughout the Gospel, Jesus is now the unambiguous divine Christ, as opposed to in an earlier Gospel like Mark, where he was a secret Messiah. That's quite an upgrade. He's the light of the world, who is actively persecuted, again, by the Jews, not just a small elite group of scribes and Pharisees any longer, who disagree with the religious practices of Jesus in the earlier Gospels. And this is where it all comes to a truly apocalyptic climax during the Festival of Sukkot, depicted in John chapter 8.
There, Jesus is depicted as the divine light and the divine word, which is not recognized by the Jews, again. But why not? Why can't they recognize it? Jesus claims that he's sent by his Father, which again, the Jews do not know. But they counter, aren't they, the Jews, children of Abraham, just like Jesus, sharing the same Father? You know, Father Abraham. Many, no, Abraham welcomed divine angelic strangers, while the Jews, according to the Gospel of John, were actively seeking to kill Jesus all the time, trying to kill the divine word and light.
But again, the Jews counter, they, along with Jesus, are all sons of God, right? We're all made in *Imago Dei*, we're all made in the image of God. And here's where things *ghastly* get kicked into high theological gear. Gospel of John, Jesus counters that their nefarious intentions are proof that the Jews are not sons of God, like Christ, of course, but but sons of a deceptive, murderous devil. Thus, the God of the Jews was not the God of Jesus. The Father of Jesus was not the Father of the Jews. Their God was Satan himself.
But the text gets stranger still. Depending on how one reads the rather tortured Greek of these sections, it seems that Jesus is actually claiming that the God of the Jews is not from the devil directly, but from the father of the devil. Thus, the God of the Jews is the father of the devil, which parallels Christ as the divine son of the true God, not again known to the Jews.
Now, how to read these verses is heavily contested, and several readings are actually possible. What has become normalized among almost all Christians at this point is to read John 8:44 as, "You are from your father the devil," such that the good God is still the Father of Jesus, and is still the ultimate Creator of both the devil, at least indirectly, and of course, the Jews. But the other reading, "You are from the father of the devil," while striking contemporary theological ears, is shocking and curious. If the Jews are from the father of the devil, and that father is also evil, who precisely is that Father? Which is to say, the father, father of both the Jews and the the the devil.
Now, you might be surprised to learn that some early Christians wondered the exact same thing. They read the verse that way. Just who is this murderous and deceptive father of the devil? And their answers are interesting, and we're going to come back to them in just a bit.
But as I mentioned earlier, along with the development of the Demiurge as a benevolent Creator of an imperfect universe, also came the philosophical tenet that the gods, or God, was morally good, and in fact, the source of all goodness, all justice, all beauty, and frankly, all intelligibility of the world at all. This link of the gods with goodness enjoyed pretty much widespread philosophical consensus in the centuries following Plato, with some exceptions, of course. But but there was a, there was a problem with that. The myths, the ancient Greek myths, and the Israelite myths, for that matter, revealed the gods to to be corrupt, some lecherous, violent, and deceptive.
For his part, Plato just wanted to edit those sections out of the myths for the creation of his utopian *Kallipolis*, which was an absolutely blasphemous, scandalous proposition in the ancient world. The Stoics took a slightly different approach. For them, the myths, in turn, the gods could kind of be rescued through a kind of esoteric hermeneutic, which would apply to the myths, would actually get rid of all that bad stuff. Thus, the so-called *allegoria* in these more outlandish and morally compromised tales, allegories for things like natural forces, philosophical processes, and a developmental cosmology. Thus, the goodness of the gods, or The God, for clothes, perhaps, was protected through a very careful rereading of the myths via allegory, metaphor, and symbolism.
Regardless of the tactic, it was a core philosophical concern to protect the goodness of the god, because by this time, the gods were largely defined precisely by just that goodness. To be a God, you had to be good, and the source of goodness was the gods, of course. This very problem also fell into the lap of the early Christians, who had just inherited the myths of the Israelites in the form of the Hebrew scriptures, or the Old Testament, but were also forging their own myths in the writing of the Gospels, the letters of Paul, and other scriptures like the, I don't know, the Apocalypse of John.
But while the earliest followers of Jesus were of course Jewish, second and third generation converts, thanks to Paul, were overwhelmingly non-Jews, and thus their relationship to the Hebrew scriptures was much more tenuous. It really wasn't their history. Again, what was scripture or an authoritative writing for a community was and would remain extremely fluid and dynamic for centuries, honestly, kind of honestly, down to this day, if you ask, I don't know, the LDS movement. And what was up for grabs during this period was just what was scripture at all.
And it would be a wealthy shipping magnate, a wealthy shipping magnate born at Pontus on the Black Sea in the late 1st century, that would provide Christianity not only its first scriptural canon, a list of authoritative texts, but perhaps also its first really carefully thought-out systematic theology. That dude was Marcion, and he was a genius.
Now, this episode can't and it will not be a systematic introduction to Marcion, but what I can very enthusiastically recommend is Dr. David Litwa's class on Marcion, on just this topic. I actually signed up for it, and it is a fantastic, comprehensive introduction to Marcion, to his teachings, his scriptures, and how he fits into the history of Christianity. It's really difficult to overstate just how important Marcion is in the development of early Christianity, and I would highly recommend checking out Dr. Litwa's class. You can find a link in the description along with a discount code. I reached out to Dr. Litwa and said, "I'd love for folks to take your class on Marcion because I really think Marcion is one of these characters that does not get the attention he deserves." And Dr. Litwa, who's a real expert in Marcion, publishing on him, translated some of Marcion's works, even got a discount code for Esoterica folks. So if you want to take Dr. Litwa's class, which I think is like $60 for like a college-level class, it's really worth it. So again, I don't do a lot of commercials on this channel, but good content is good content. And when it's an affordable class on really good scholarship with a discount, check it out.
But now that you've, uh, stopped the video and gone to take Dr. Litwa's class on Marcion, you can skip this section. Don't skip the section. In summary, Marcion adopted two kinds of scriptures: the *Evangelion*, an early form of the Gospel of Luke, and the *Apostolic*, a collection of the letters of Paul, 10 letters, I think, along with a kind of introduction, the *Antithesis*. Sometime in the mid-130s, he actually traveled to Rome to meet with a pretty, at this point, rather ad hoc group of church leaders called the Presbyters, who oversaw the then very loosely connected Christian movement. Again, this is not the world of the Catholic Church with like one bishop controlling everything or something. Anyway, he met with the Presbyters to present his theology, along with making a donation of about 200,000 sesterces, worth about 50,000 denarii, or 60-something years of labor, a huge amount of money, even given the Neronian debasement. This was a big chunk of money.
At any rate, he had developed his theology from it, admittedly on my part, careful reading of the Hebrew scriptures, and his conclusions are striking, as they are reasonable in their own way. The God of the Hebrew Bible was not a God at all for Marcion, but an evil Creator being, a demonic being. Perhaps that evil Creator sought to and did, at least appear to, kill the truly divine Son of God, Jesus the Christ, via his agents, the Jews. Christianity must then be the rejection of that false and evil Creator God of the Jews, and the salvific embrace of the divine Christ. This theology was, it was rejected. The Presbyters are like, "No, not that." It was rejected by the Presbyters of Rome. He wasn't excommunicated, so far as we can tell. They did give him his money back, and Marcion continued to establish churches on his own time to promote his own theological vision, just like every other Christian group did. Recall again, there's no centralized church at this time, and numerous Christianities abounded. And Marcionite churches are attested as late as the mid-5th century of the Common Era. In fact, Cyril of Jerusalem actually warned people going to a new city, especially out East, to make sure to ask for a specifically Catholic Church, otherwise they'd probably end up at a Maronite one.
And while Maronite Christianity, which we shouldn't call it Marcionite Christianity, we should just call it Christianity led by Marcion, we don't call it Iranian Christianity or Tertullian Christianity, it did go extinct, its intuitive theology still persists. You still hear people contrast the wrathful, jealous, judgy, wajy God of the Old Testament with the Kumbaya hippie Jesus of the New Testament in a kind of dollar-store Marianismo. Theology is extremely sophisticated.
So let's quickly go through his arguments as far as we can, because they're mostly preserved in the people that hated him, but let's try to reconstruct his arguments to get out how he derived the idea of the evil Creator. A decisive moment in the development of the malevolent Demiurge, in a sense, Marcion provides three pretty powerful arguments in defense of his central theological position on the evil Creator. But to be clear, this Creator was not a God. It was not a God from Arion. Some of his early opponents, like Tertullian, would love to paint him as a polytheist by committing him to a kind of dualistic theology as a way to dismiss his arguments, because, you know, polytheism is inherently laughable, man, these people. But that was apparently never Marcion's position. The non-God Creator was perhaps a wicked, demonic being, for all we can tell, but he was actively contrasted to the divine Son of God, that is Christ.
But his arguments basically take three forms: a diagnostic argument, the antithetical arguments, and the Pauline arguments. So let's tackle each of them briefly in turn. The first, what I called the diagnostic arguments. These are the results of Marcion carefully reading the Hebrew Bible, or the Old Testament, and just noticing the specifically moral and character traits of the God depicted in those scriptures. Well, well, what kind of God is this based on? Well, let's take a look at God's own history and God's own pronouncements as recorded by his own people. So that should be a relatively reliable insight into that God, because typically you paint your God as awesome as possible.
Well, the picture is rosy for Marcion, quite simply. Marcion attests to an entity that is vain, jealous, deceptive, murderous, wrathful, morally wavering, incapable of ignorance, prone to changing God's mind, even repenting of things, clearly making mistakes. God mocks people. He admonishes genocide and pillaging. God delights in war and carnage. He punishes innocent children for their parents' sins. He smashes children's heads against rocks and delights in that. Breaks promises, sows enmity between all kinds of people, hardens people's hearts, making them incapable of change and repentance, props up murderous, rapacious autocrats as kings, looking at you, David. And by his own account, literally created evil there in Isaiah 45. Also, that's not even counting, by the way, all the things that we consider morally outrageous from our moral standards, like slavery, that the Israelite God happily legislated.
In effect, Marcion effectively diagnoses the Creator being of the Hebrew Bible as being something akin to what we now might consider a psychopath these days, something like Sky Ted Bundy. Certainly, if goodness makes a God, then this wicked Creator must be something truly demonic, worthy of being loathed and anything other than being worshiped.
But Marcion doesn't stop there. He deepens his critique by comparing the horrid character and deeds of the evil Creator with the divine Christ as recorded in the Gospels in his next introductory text of the scriptures called the Antithesis. Now, the original text of this is lost, unfortunately, but aspects of it can be reconstructed from quotations, again, found in Marcion's enemies. But the central point of the text was to drive a comparative wedge between the unjust law of the Old Testament, we would call it, to the freeing Gospel of the New Testament, by contrasting the character and actions, again, of the malevolent Creator as he detected it and the divine Christ, respectively. These contrasting descriptions basically revive the theological hermeneutic by which Marcion developed his overall theological position and probably by by which he guided his followers and how to understand and basically debate with early other Christians.
Thus, the Creator urges the Israelites to pillage Egypt during the Exodus, but Christ, of course, argued that one should go even without shoes or wallets. It's sort of a vow of poverty. The law warrants "eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth," showing no pity. Christ urges people to turn the other cheek when slapped, forgiving even our enemies, loving our enemies after being mocked. The Creator sent bears to maul children to avenge the prophet Elisha, which is an admittedly hilarious story, but at any rate, Christ declares that the children should come unto him, for such is the Kingdom of Heaven. The evil Creator outstretched Moses's arms and a miracle to allow extended slaughter and warfare, while Christ opened up his arms and sacrifice for all of humankind. The Creator is an "ish man of war." Christ comes to bring peace, except for when he comes to bring a sword. The Creator urges offensive warfare, why Christ offers the pacifistic armor of faith. And such and so on. You can kind of see this, how this goes.
Marcion's intents are meant to show that the Creator is the opposite of Christ in both character and actions, in stark contrast, and therefore there can be no continuity or truck between the two.
Finally, Marcion turns to about 10 letters of Paul, which he takes to be a kind of divine revelation in themselves. Again, Christ did show up to Paul and reveal things to him, but he does this, of course, to reveal his own theology, as all people, Christians do, at 1 Corinthians 2:8 and 2 Corinthians 4:4. Marcion notes that Paul argues that the righteous in the world must contend with the God of this world and against the rulers, the archons of this world, who crucified Jesus, the divine Christ. For Marcion, this contrast of the God of this world and the various rulers indicates that, to him, Paul is referring to the diabolical Creator in it, then, not the true divine Father and his son, Christ, of course.
Further, the world ruler, or cosmocrator, as Marcion sometimes has him, is also responsible for putting a veil over the minds of those that are currently being destroyed, according to Paul, thus mentally preventing them from accepting the Messianic Gospel. In some sense, the God of this world is veiling people from accepting the Gospel and destroying them all the while. And this well accords with the kind of hardening of Pharaoh that we see in the book of Exodus and other such stultifying activities of the evil Creator. Thus, Marcion detects Paul pointing at the struggle with the diabolical world Creator as a ruler and veiler and hardener of hearts in this world, preventing the promulgation of the Gospel.
Further, at Ephesians 2:15, it denotes Christ as having "destroyed the law of the commandments by his teachings." The teachings of Jesus, specifically. Marcion is recalling those moments where Jesus seems to have flouted or overturned the standard Jewish law, the Torah, by doing things like healing people and gathering grain on the Sabbath, touching lepers, disallowing their disciples to bury their dead parents, and also being really strict about divorce, which is interesting. Christ is much more strict on divorce than the other rabbis are, such that if Christ is the divine good, that must mean that the law, or the Torah, the law given to Moses, must have come from the evil Creator, and therefore must in some sense be evil. It must be bad.
Thus, in Marcion's reading of Paul, which ultimately isn't that heterodox in some ways, Christ has come to destroy the law, Christ as Lord of the Sabbath, a Sabbath made for humans, not humans for the Sabbath, as the power of humans, which leads them to death. The law leads them to death, according to Paul. Thus, the turn of Christ is to destroy that law, thus freeing him beings from slavery to death via precisely that law.
Finally, while Paul does maintain that the law, or Torah, is a kind of justice, it's a totally false justice for Marcion, hiding the wickedness of the Creator. But it is under that ruse that the Creator and his minion, the Jews, conspired through willful deception to have Christ murdered, specifically by coming a curse upon the cross. Now, Christians had to long, long deal with this accusation that Jesus was cursed, or had become a curse upon the cross of crucifixion, as per Deuteronomy 21:23. And early church fathers, man, they jumped through a range of hermeneutical escapes and mental gymnastics to try to explain this away. And we even see in cases like, I don't know, the Dialogue with Trypho with Justin Martyr, that Jews probably did use this as a wedge against the Christians.
Marcion just goes full tilt. Only according to the law of the Creator did Christ have become a curse upon the cross, hung on a tree. But in fact, the joke was on the evil Creator. By sacrificing himself, and thus letting the vile Creator think that he had won the day, did Christ in fact pull the greatest ruse and thus liberate mankind from the law of sin and death, the wretched tools and traps of the Creator? It absolutely wasn't that Jesus was justly crucified for breaking the laws of the evil Creator, but that Christ had willfully sacrificed himself for the redemption of human beings. This being a complete triumph, a final blow, fully revealing the Creator as irredeemably wicked, unjustly attempting to murder divinity itself.
And that, folks, brings us back to that strange problem in the Gospel of John. If the Jews are the children of the devil's father, just who is that father? At least six various forms of early Christianity had noticed that rather relatively odd verse in John and had read it at something of faith value. Christ had been sent upon the Jews, whose apparent brother was nothing short of the devil, but whose father, the devil's father, was a liar and murderer since the beginning, the whole synagogue of Satan's stuff. And those six early Christian groups agreed that the devil himself was a kind of subordinate being to something far more ontologically archaic and horrible. And for those Christians, they're, those mentioned by Irenaeus, the Parai, or the Transversal, the Artics, the Sethians, the followers of the Prophet Mani, among a couple of other ones that we have some glimpse into, their answer was shockingly unanimous, in some sense. The father of the devil, mentioned at John 8, was the horrible Creator of the physical cosmos, known variously as Sabaoth, the Creator, the Ruler, the Creator of Matter, or the one born out of chaos, the child of chaos, Yaldabaoth.
But even this answer only sort of kicks the mythological can down the road, so to speak. An outstanding question surely remained: what are the origins of the father of the devil? What are the origins of this demonic Demiurge, Sakas, Sabaoth, the Creator and ruler of our cosmic prison?
While out in the Eastern Mediterranean, Marcionite Christianity would continue to thrive for centuries, as I mentioned, with its demonized notion of the Creator and legislator of the cosmos. Most in the West, specifically in the Egyptian context, something of a radical shift seems to have occurred early in the 2nd century of the Common Era, perhaps either in parallel with Marcion, influenced by his theology, or a bit of both. We, we don't know. There, it appears that the demonization of Judaism and the Jewish God Yahweh as the Egyptian demon Set, the elaborate cosmologies and cosmogonies of the Greco-Egyptian religions, arguments condemning the Creator as evil, as we've already seen, quasi-magic technologies of mystical ascent, and the esoteric theologies associated with Christ would generate a genre of malevolent or evil demiurgic traditions that we now associate with Gnosticism and Gnostic Christianity. Though, as we'll see in the final episode of this series, maybe final episode of this series, those traditions are internally quite different. And by comparing the Sethian Demiurge described in the Apocryphon of John with the Valentinian Demiurge in texts like the Gospel of Truth, along with various other traditions, we'll see just how really complex the origins of the Demiurge truly became.
Again, this episode is deeply indebted to Dr. David Litwa's wonderful book, *The Evil Creator*, which you absolutely have to read if you haven't had the chance to take a look at it yet. Again, also his class on Marcion and Marcionism, both well worth checking out. Again, you can take that class, which is already wonderfully priced with a discount. You can check out the link in the description below.
But at least one more episode on the origins of the malevolent Demiurge, the cosmic warden of this prison. Until then, I'm Dr. Justin Sledge, and thank you for watching Esoterica, where we explore the arcane in history, philosophy, and religion.
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