Transcription
I'm not much of a romantic, and I think that nostalgia is basically a form of depression. But it's hard for me not to look back on the intellectual history of the first few centuries of the Common Era, frankly, without a little bit of romanticism and a kind of weird nostalgia.
It was a time of massive intellectual ferment, and it saw the rise of the philosophies and spiritualities that are, amazingly, still with us today. We're the angsty teens, and that was our cradle. Though, given the wide variety of intellectual and spiritual positions at play, some radically, even fundamentally disagreeing with one another, a wide amount of agreement was had on at least one issue: while the cosmos wasn't perfect, it was the creation or emanation of an ultimately good, beneficent being, and it was created specifically with human beings' flourishing in mind. Even across the sometimes wide gulf between the intellectual and spiritual factions, there was still agreement on this point, if nothing else.
But this intellectual and spiritual peace would, it would not hold. Somewhere, perhaps in several places at once, actually, deep within the crucible of the molten philosophy and mysticism that would become Christianity, a daring, even shocking, positively scandalous idea was bubbling to the surface. One that would unite Pagan philosophers like Plotinus, proto-Catholics like Irenaeus, and the early rabbis of Judaism in palpable disgust and outrage: that our world, our cosmos, was a horrifying prison created by a malevolent mistake. The crafter or demiurge of the universe was not God, not even a god, but a nightmarish demon drunken with delusion, wrath, and jealousy, known variously as Yaldabaoth, Saklas, Samael, among other names.
How did this renegade concept of the malevolent Creator emerge? Now, what do we know about this demonic demiurge? If you're interested in magic, hermetic philosophy, alchemy, Kabbalah, Gnosticism, or the history of the occult, make sure to subscribe here to Esoterica and check out my other content on topics in esotericism. Also, if you want to provide work like this, providing accessible, scholarly, and free content on topics in esotericism here on YouTube, I'd hope you consider supporting my work either at my Patreon, with a one-time donation via PayPal, with the Super Thanks option you can find just below the video, or by picking up some of the channel merch on the store tab. We even have some Gnostic-related merch, cool shirts and stuff.
And also, this episode is pretty exciting because it's a collaboration with a friend, colleague, and scholar, Dr. M. David Litwa, an expert on Gnosticism, as much as scholars still entertain that term. In fact, his book, *The Evil Creator*, is, in my opinion, one of the best resources on this topic, and this episode is absolutely indebted to his work and scholarship. Thank you. Make sure to check out his companion video on this topic and make sure to subscribe to his channel, which is honestly one of the best resources for really in-depth analysis of Gnosticism.
But let's turn to the origins and the nature of the malevolent Creator, the demiurge. Yaldabaoth, the Saklas. I'm Dr. Justin Sledge, and welcome to Esoterica, where we explore the arcane in history, philosophy, and religion.
As I mentioned in the introduction, despite the wide variety of intellectual and spiritual philosophies floating about around the turn of the Common Era, there was pretty broad agreement that among them, that the gods or God, if you are a monotheist, they were fundamentally good, and that the cosmos that they created, if imperfect, was still a reflection of their ultimate beneficence, especially toward humanity. I mean, they all basically, all agreed that it was created for us, except for the Epicureans. From Stoics to Platonists, Jews and Hermeticists, Indigenous Egyptian priests and the various Mediterranean cults of the time, there was intellectual and spiritual consensus, at least on the issue of the goodness of the Gods. It's basically what made them good was their goodness, and by extension, the relative beneficence of the cosmos. That is what makes the rise of the concept of the malevolent Creator so shocking to the ancient people of the world. And aside from a random uh, Schopenhauer-esque skulking in the dark, I see you back there, it's still a pretty shocking idea to us today.
So, there are at least two, at least two questions at work here. The first is, where did the concept of the demiurge come from at all? And secondly, and I think much more interesting to my mind, and probably your mind as well, how did the concept of a beneficent demiurge become inverted? How did we end up in spiritual Lovecraft country?
Now, to get at that, it's going to take at least a few episodes. And in this one, we're going to be exploring the origins of the concept of the demiurge itself, in the form of the demonization of Yahweh, as that God became identified with the Egyptian god of deserts and storms and chaos, the archetypal murderer, Seth. Now, in later episodes, we'll explore how the deification of Jesus, along with some early Christian literature, introduce the notion of a satanic Creator and ruler of the cosmos, especially in theologians like Marcion. Further, and again, in later episodes, we're going to have to show that how the demiurge is a rather complicated figure in what we now call Gnosticism, complicated in the sense that, well, it's not always just profoundly evil. And by comparing the demiurge of the Sethian and the Valentinian literature, we'll see there's actually a spectrum of demiurge morality, or demiurge nature. So, definitely a few episodes on the demiurge coming up, so stay tuned.
But that first question, where the demiurge comes from, is, it's pretty easy to answer. Like virtually every concept in the philosophical West, it's, it's Plato. Here's the obligatory Whitehead quote for that. Specifically, the concept emerges in his dialogue, the *Timaeus*. Plato, having already done a great deal of discussing the eternal, unchanging world of being, where in the perfect forms are the *tex*, just assumes, by the way, that you've read and really understand books six and seven of the *Republic*. That conversation actually takes place a day before the *Timaeus*, so it's actually a back-to-back conversation. Must have been exhausting.
Well, with the eternal world of being described, we have to turn to the origin and nature of our world, the cosmos, the imperfect world of change and becoming. Now, Plato admits that no one was around aside from the demiurge at that time and tries to provide what he calls an *eikota muthan*, or a likely account, a likely myth, of the origin and nature of the cosmos. Specifically, he seems to be doing a few things at once. He's answering the principle of the sufficient reason vis-à-vis the universe: where did this come from? He's integrating that answer, to the degree possible, with his own religious inheritance, specifically Homer and Homer, and he's finally integrating all of that with his own theory of the forms, such that the cosmos is given a kind of orderly progression of creation, fitting the perfection of the forms, the perfect way that they receive those impressions into matter, and the relative orderliness, frankly, the orderliness of the world, the universe, the cosmos as we encounter it.
And while this is not the place to do a blow-by-blow of the *Timaeus*, a few important points here are worth making. The first is that, given the perfection of the forms, a maximally beneficent crafter or demiurge of the cosmos is logically necessitated. There simply couldn't be anything other than a maximally good demiurge. For Plato, however, Plato's demiurge has only *hyle*, or matter, a kind of fundamental physical stuff, by which to create the cosmos. Unlike the eternal, perfect forms, *hyle* is by nature changeable, imperfect, imperishable. Thus, while the demiurge does their best to shape the cosmos using the best possible blueprint, so to speak, the final result, result, simply, it can't be perfect. The matter it's made out of isn't perfect. It's like designing the ideal house inside your mind; no matter what you end up building in reality, it will always fall short of that ideal. Now, that's not the demiurge's fault, and certainly, it's not born out of any malice on their part. It's just a limitation of the nature of matter. In fact, the demiurge creates the maximally good cosmos, given the perfection of the forms and the very limitations of matter. Thus, the globe of the cosmos is a beautiful living creature, composed of heterogeneous elements, which are fundamentally, actually, perfect geometric solids, suffused with an intelligent soul, making it, in fact, divine. All of the world, the cosmos, is a god, creatures all balanced between sameness and difference, with existence itself being the mean of all of these relations. The human being is actually the microcosmic reflection of that cosmic microcosm, the nexus of being and becoming, an eternal soul which may enjoy the forms, and yet, at the same time, a physical body born of cosmic becoming. Thus, we're little mini demiurges, demi-demiurges, creating objects of beauty, justice, unity, and the good, such that we may contemplate the true reality of beauty and and justness and unity and goodness.
Now, there, the *Timaeus* leaves us with as many questions as it does answers. Remember that for Plato, the account that he gives is only an *eikota muthan*. It's a likely account, whatever "likely" means here. When Plato's philosophical heirs were at great pains to systematize this account, often with Aristotle's account of the Divine thought thinking itself as God, the unmoved mover of *Metaphysics* Book 12, and in general, for the Middle Platonists, as they're called, which is a kind of bubbling cauldron of Platonic, Neoplatonic, Aristotelian, Stoic, some random Judaism, and other religious philosophies such as Hermeticism, all bubbling there in the few centuries before the Common Era, especially in Alexandria, the demiurge becomes basically a kind of primeval God before time itself, though also creating other demigods in the process of unfolding our reality. So the system is, by most, monotheistic, though your mileage may vary depending on if you're a Philonist or a Hermeticist or whoever. It's all surrounded by a similar primeval matter, with the forms being the perfect thoughts actually within the mind of the demiurge. Of course, there are as many variations on this motif as there were philosophers at that time, and even more variations on the procession of creation, or the emanation of creation, by which we arrive at the cosmos as we know it. But to loop back, despite all those numerous variations, there was broad agreement on the goodness of the demiurge, the maximal beneficence of the cosmos, and the importance of our place in it.
But that was all about to change into a horrifying demon, with the cosmos becoming a spiritual prism, and we becoming souls trapped within a body, desperate to escape this, this nightmare. And now, it's time for us to be honest. We don't know exactly when, by whom, and how that changed. The evidence is pretty meager, and what I'm going to provide, given the scholarship that I've studied, is an *eikota muthan*, a likely account, at least informed speculation. So let's, let's go. Let's proceed knowing that we're crossing into some pretty dark waters.
The first thing to say here is that an earlier generation of scholars actually argued that the development of the evil, evil demiurge took place within Alexandrian Jewish circles. This theory speculated that Jews at the very periphery of their social, intellectual, and philosophical circles, perhaps those Jews at the very limits, at the adjacent of some of those magical practices that produce some of the books like *Sefer Yetzirah*, were ultimately responsible for the development of the evil demiurge. Says this theory, it's largely rejected now, but it's the dominant theory you may read in old books. Perhaps it was a rebellion against their more emergent Orthodox theologians, an outgrowth of Jewish dualism with the so-called "two powers in heaven" heresy, which really frightened the rabbis way more than Christianity ever did, the influence of dualism on their theology, or response to the historical material reality of Jewish suffering during the Judean-Roman wars, the violent Alexandrian pogroms, the Kitos War, and finally, the genocide that followed in the Bar Kokhba Rebellion. It was a pretty crappy time to be Jewish in the second century. So you might want to dip out. In other words, when, when God gives you lemons, God must be evil. In fact, something similar actually emerged after the Holocaust with what is now known as abusive God theology. And that stuff makes, makes H.P. Lovecraft look like, like Elmo on MDMA. Abusive God theology.
But there are logical and evidentiary problems with this line of thinking. First, there's just, there's just no evidence of evil demiurge thinking in any known Jewish text. It seems to fly in the face of basically every tenet of Judaism that is foundational to it. And Judaism does a pretty good job of preserving heterodox opinions. And the Jewish writers of the time, from the earliest rabbis to Hellenizing Philonists and the generations that follow, they seem to all land on the exact opposite position of the evil demiurge idea, and they never pontificate against what would seem to be that position. It's just silent in the narrative. That's just to say, there's no Jewish evidence, positive or negative, for the emergence or even the presence of the Jewish evil demiurge in their circles. In fact, it only takes place in Christian works, in Christian works, primarily those of the second century, like the famous *Apocryphon of John*, the most popular book in this genre. However, the idea likely has its origins not in Judaism, but in the Pagan demonization of the Israelite God Yahweh.
At the heart of post-exilic Israelite mythology is the story of the Exodus. That is, the accounts of the descendants of Joseph that were allegedly enslaved by Egyptian pharaohs and forced into labor camps for 400 years. Eventually, the Egyptians perceived a demographic threat from the Israelite women and engaged in mass infanticide, with Moses surviving, rescued of course, and then raised in the house of Pharaoh. After beating an Egyptian taskmaster to death, Moses flees into the wilderness of Midian. He gets advice from, uh, a burning bush and a divine mission to return to Pharaoh and liberate the Israelite people from Egyptian bondage. Pharaoh is a, he's a no-go on that one. And, uh, you know what follows there: a series of horrifying plagues. Eventually, the Israelite God murdering all the firstborn Egyptians, even, even the poor animals get killed by, by the angel of death, including Pharaoh's son. Following this, the Israelites are liberated, but not before plundering Egyptian wealth. They, they go on a looting rampage. Pharaoh's despair, of course, turns to rage. In the Sea of Reeds, or the Red Sea, is split, the Israelites escape, and Pharaoh and his army are drowned. Oh yeah, and the Israelites, they live happily ever after after that. Everything's fine for the Israelites and the Jewish people. Nothing ever bad happens again.
Now, the origins of this myth, the Levitical Exodus story, um, might be a good one. Freedman gives an interesting idea of what it's called, the Leviticus Exodus Theory, might be a possible historical seed of the Exodus. But this myth has become foundational in the centuries prior to the turn of the Common Era, as Judaism is becoming a religion as we might recognize it. And for Judeans living in Judea, celebrating this myth in Hebrew, well, that's all fine and good as far as myths go. But during this period, most Jews didn't live in Judea. They were increasingly spread through the world that would become the Roman Empire, and were especially concentrated in the Egyptian port city of Alexandria. The Egyptian city of Alexandria, further, this wasn't just in their native language there. It was being translated into the vernacular Greek of the time, and worse, it had even been translated into Greek for performance by Ezekiel the Tragedian by the third century BCE. This Judean Exodus myth was being performed in Egypt in the public vernacular for all to hear, all during the twilight of proud Egyptian autonomy. It could have only been salt on the wound of the end of Egyptian civilization as it existed for thousands of years.
Now, as you can well imagine, this myth was, well, not exactly well-perceived by Egyptian people. It paints their empire as defeated by a bunch of slaves who expropriate them in the end. It paints the Egyptians as sorcerers, slavers, and psychopathic baby murderers. It hits their traditional gods as helpless against a single foreign desert god, and their divine pharaohs as vicious pawns, ultimately drowned. And that's the worst imaginable death in the Egyptian religion. Drowning is an awful death for the ancient Egyptians. Any Egyptian would have found this myth highly offensive at basically every register. In fact, other non-Jews would have found it frankly laughable, given the splendor and power of ancient Egypt and the relative backwater that was Judea, if one were to measure the power of the gods by their relative social success. Okay, the Judeans had one rather amazing temple to speak of, one. The Egyptians had hundreds, thousands, and all of those were of supreme antiquity, ancientness, and grandeur, both being the prime indicators of the powers of the gods in antiquity. And thus, the Hellenizing Egyptians deployed a powerful religious weapon to counter this scandalous, this offensive Exodus story. The Judean God was a donkey-headed demon. Yeah, for real. That, that was the comeback.
Yahweh was a donkey-headed demon. In the indigenous religion of the Egyptians, the god Seth was responsible for chaos, the desert, wilderness, violent storms, and the barbaric foreigners that threatened ancient Egypt. He was also the usurper who murdered his brother Osiris, hacking his body into pieces, and locked eternally in combat with the symbol of justice, Horus. He was depicted, at least early on, by a strange, otherwise unknown animal known in scholarship as the typhonic beast, with a sunken muzzle and floppy ears, sometimes appearing like a kind of hybrid dog-like, perhaps desert scavenger kind of animal. However, as the centuries went on, the head of this beast became more and more donkey-like. Further, the popular Canaanite storm god Baal also became associated with Seth in the Egyptian imagination. In fact, Baal's name, when it's written in the Egyptian language, actually uses this Seth animal determinative, probably indicating his foreignness and desert-dwelling character. This shows that they were somehow equivocated in the mind of the average Egyptian scribe, at least.
And as Hellenism took hold, so did the *interpretatio graeca*, whereby the gods of various national pantheons were set in a kind of system of grand correspondences. Thus, famously, the Greek Hermes was equivalent to the Roman Mercury, the Etruscan Tages, the Egyptian Thoth, the Carthaginian Tanit, the Gallic Lugus, and most famously, in at least in our neck of the woods here, Hermes Trismegistus, sort of a combination of Hermes and Thoth into one mythical Egyptian sage. Of course, this could function in an ecumenical sense. The same gods worshiped variously in various places actually went to great lengths to lay the groundwork for the Imperial religious tolerance of Roman fame. The Romans were kind of like, "We all basically worship the same set of gods, and we can all get along, as long as you, you pay your taxes." But this could also be used for polemical ends. And that seems to be exactly what the Egyptian answer to the scandal of the Exodus and the Israelite God Yahweh was: to link the demonic Seth of the Egyptian Pantheon with the Israelite God Yahweh.
Now, such a move would not have been at all theologically difficult for the Egyptians. The first step's already there: the linking of Egyptian Seth with Canaanite Baal. Of course, Judeans would have found this link horrible and offensive. Yahweh and Baal being bitter mythological enemies, at least from the Judean perspective. But from the Egyptian point of view, that would have been just what Freud would have called the narcissism of minor difference. Both Baal and Yahweh were, at least as far as the Egyptians cared, minor Canaanite storm gods, worshiped by barbaric foreigners whose only claim to historical fame was actually just the trade routes that ran north and south through their lands near the sea, down through the Levant. Otherwise, they were just desert-dwelling nomads or Highlander bandits.
Are both Seth, the god of storms, chaos, the desert waste, and foreigners, as historically linked with Baal, it was an easy slide to link with Yahweh. Yahweh himself was a kind of warrior storm god, thunderstorms, though not coastal storms. In fact, just reading the Exodus story reveals more Seth-like properties. He's the causer of pestilences and eclipses, and he brings darkness, and he turns the life-giving Nile into blood. Blood was used over the lintels of the Israelite homes to protect them as a horrifying angel went through murdering all these children and animals. Even the color red is linked to Seth in the ancient literature. And in the Greek Magical Papyri, Yahweh leads them into the desert, of all places, to worship in the wilderness of Mount Sinai, at a mountain enshrouded in *ara'el* in Hebrew, deep darkness and fire and lightning abounding. Even one of the major Greek terms for Yahweh, *Iao*, sounds a bit like the indigenous Egyptian word for donkey, *yaah*, or later the Coptic *yaho*, literally donkey-headed *yaho*. Yahweh, donkey god, the animal at that time most associated with the demonic Seth.
Thus, by the first few centuries before the Common Era, it had become a bit of token slander to suggest that the Jews worshiped a donkey-headed deity, despite their claim that no images of their God were allowed either in their Jerusalem Temple or otherwise, for that matter. Around 200 BCE, we hear from the Alexandrian Manetho that an Idumean, a southern person from the same stock as Herod, actually had torn off the head of the, uh, donkey shrine within the Jerusalem Temple. It was a golden donkey head. A narrative that's repeated a century later by Apollonius Molon and the Stoic philosopher Posidonius, where in that story, Antiochus IV Epiphanes, Hanukkah, Antiochus the Seleucid leader whose outrages would ultimately lead to, well, war, he entered he entered the temple and found a golden statue with a donkey-headed deity around 167 BCE. Around the same time, around the turn of the Common Era, are certain Democritus also recounted Jewish worship of a donkey-headed golden deity, and likewise did Apion. And even the historian Tacitus, who should have, who should have known better, but he repeats the story anyway. In the 90s of the Common Era, the Roman Jewish historian Josephus would actually have to defend Judeans from just these claims in his writings.
Indeed, the entire Exodus narrative was being inverted. Rather than being saved by a mighty hand and an outstretched arm, in the literature, the Pagan literature, the Israelites were depicted as lepers, actually, just expelled in mass from Egypt, not liberated by any God. In fact, Plutarch even depicts the demon god Seth escaping Egypt on donkey back, a journey taking seven days, precisely to mock the origins of the Jewish Sabbath. He's even said to have fathered sons, one named Jerusalem and one named Judea, literally making the Jews the descendants of the demon god Seth. Of course, this would have been all the more outrageous and horrifying to the Judeans at the time, given that their traditional way of making fun of the Egyptians, they mock the Egyptian gods by saying they worshiped a bunch of animals with bird heads and crocodile heads. Now their God, now their God Yahweh was the stereotypically stupidest beast of them all, the braying donkey. Apologies for any donkeys watching. I apologize. Got to be careful this episode. I'm going to get donkey-canceled.
The link of Seth and Yahweh can actually even be found tentatively, perhaps, in the magical practices of this time, many of which are localized primarily in the Egyptian Alexandrian context. And these spells and gems, Seth and Yahweh are not only invoked together, but the repetitive nature of these spells may further indicate that in the mind of these sorcerers, they were the same thing. In PGM 377, Ya Seth is invoked with one of the names invoked by being written on a metal sheet, which is then inserted into the ear of a drowned cat, and has the power to inform dreams and to, uh, stop chariot racers and do all kinds of erotic binding magic or love magic. We use the term erotic binding magic to show that there's no consent there. You need consent for it to be love. Another divinatory spell at PGM 4179 allows an Egyptian king a divine revelation and repeatedly invokes the name Yao along with Mighty Typhon, God of Gods, again, another possible identification of Seth with Yahweh, and then Seth also with Typhon. Also uses the hairs of a donkey, donkey, to anoint the lips and make a cord that is wrapped around the head as a kind of crown with the 100-letter name of Seth, again invoking Typhon and Yaldabaoth, clearly there, the Jewish god Adonai Sabaoth. Another at PGM 43275 sends agony upon a woman by inscribing a brick with the image of a donkey, again with the name Ya, Yaah, upon its face. The brick on the other side, on the other side of the brick, also includes a series of invocations, including a lot of different gods, but one of them there is, of course, Typhon, Seth. Perhaps one of the most famous magical gems of this period also includes the image of a donkey-headed deity with serpents for legs and a shield inscribed Yao. Here again, linking Seth, Typhon, and Yahweh. Another such gem in the British Museum also has a similar figure labeled Yao, again, now surrounded by angelic names: Uriel, Suriel, Gabriel, and Michael, unmistakably linking this entity with Yahweh.
Of course, the exact nature of these magical gems is unclear. What they were supposed to do isn't really known, but they certainly seemed to add evidence to the idea that in the mind of Egyptians, at least, in the terms of these magical practitioners, Seth and Yahweh were being combined. In fact, the notion that Jews worshiped a donkey-headed deity would actually be transposed onto early Christians. Ironically, a Jewish-like stunt man performing in the animal shows of the time would often hold up a placard during his act that said "Oni Theos," God of the Christians. Now, this otherwise unknown word *Oni* means something like donkey and wedding, and it might have an incantation of wedding bed. Thus, maybe the Christian God was born to a bestial cohabitation. There are a lot of speculations at this time about whose Jesus's daddy was. Further, Minucius Felix also accuses Christians of worshiping a donkey-headed deity, and most infamously, in an engraving of the third century, a man of fine lifting up his hand near the image of a crucified man with a donkey head, the inscription reading "Alexamenos worshiped God."
However, it would be in precisely Christian texts of this time that the evil demiurge would first appear. And such Yahweh donkey imagery actually persists into those texts and their cosmology. In some texts, the ruling archons associated with Saturn, often associated with Sabaoth and Yahweh, are thought of as pig-like or donkey-shaped, according to the *Gnosticus*. It's also similar happening in the *Pistis Sophia*. In the *Apocryphon of John*, the horrible demiurge is Seth-like with its serpent imagery and being associated with chaos. Yaldabaoth may very well be something like "chaos child" in a very garbled form of Aramaic. The name being built into the very nature of the demiurge. In fact, one of the sons of Yaldabaoth has the face of a donkey, at least in one of the manuscripts, and is explicitly called "the face of Typhon Seth." The famous Ophite diagram also lists "Yaoel," literally "donkey God," as either an archon or perhaps even just another name of the demiurge, Yaldabaoth.
All of this shows that the link between the demonization of Yahweh by his association with the demon god Seth survived well into at least these Christian milieus, both by them developing their theologies, but also both by their Jewish and Pagan opponents to mock them. Thus, by the turn of the Common Era, probably an anti-Jewish polemic emerging out of Egypt, Yahweh would become linked with the demonic god Seth and mocked as being donkey-headed, a trait again of Seth. It seems that in the eyes of at least some Egyptians, Yahweh wasn't a God, but something demonic, associated with the desert, wilderness, with barbarity, with foreigners, and most of all, perhaps, with chaos.
And in the midst of all these theological polemics, the executed Jesus of Nazareth undergoes apotheosis. The executed Jesus becomes the Divine Christ. This would set the stage for the next transmutation. What exactly to do with Yahweh now that Jesus was deified? Was he Yahweh incarnate? Another being created like Yahweh was? He the physical manifestation of the Angel of the Lord? Was Jesus actually the true God, and Yahweh something else, perhaps something evil? From early Christian literature grappling with the nature of the Divine Christ, the origins of the cosmos, and the role of the law, or the Torah, among early Christianity would emerge one of the first true theological positions and the first canons of early Christianity: that of Marcion. It would be Marcion that would argue that the being of the Old Testament wasn't a god at all, but a malevolent Creator, an enslaver, and a murderer, the murderer of Jesus, no less, who though ultimately was defeated by the true God, Christ.
Now, if you've ever heard amateur theologians note that the Old Testament God was all fire and brimstone, unlike, you know, love and light and hugs Jesus, well, just turn that up and welcome to the Christianity of the Marcionites. Growing up in Mississippi, Marcionites, of course, that wouldn't be the end of the career of the malevolent demiurge in other Christian texts. So-called Gnostic texts, perhaps independent, perhaps completely independent of Marcionite theology, and maybe under more direct Yahweh-Seth indigenous Egyptian influence, the demiurge plays a pivotal and complex role in the tragedy-redemption cycle of, well, all of reality. In some schools, a horrible, jealous, ignorant, and rage-filled being who creates a physical world as a kind of vast cosmic prison after being created, basically as a mistake. In other texts, those typically associated with the Church of Valentinus, the demiurge is a bit of an adult, kind of, kind of stupid, but it's through which Divine Wisdom directs the creation of reality, at least physical reality, in the end of a final redemption. Even the demiurge in that literature is ultimately able to find redemption.
So, we've built the foundation of the myth of the evil demiurge. Next, we're going to turn to the metaphysical, legal, and textual issues of early Christianity and their answers by Marcion, before turning to what we all now, I think, recognize as the great Gnostic Barbelo myths, especially those of the Sethians and, of course, the Valentinians. So, lots more demiurge content coming. But again, make sure to check out Dr. Litwa's channel, his companion episode, and his amazing book, *The Evil Creator*. Also, get a copy of his translation of *Refutation of All Heresies*. It's a fantastic translation. Oh, and *Hermetica 2.0*, which is out in paperback finally. I bought the hardcover issue, so I was so excited to get it, but a fantastic anthology of Hermetic texts from Dr. Litwa, again, now out in paperback, much more affordable. Until next time, I'm Dr. Justin Sledge, and thank you for watching Esoterica, where we explore the arcane in history, philosophy, and religion.