Transcription
It's difficult to imagine it now, but Christianity forwarded some of the most theologically shocking positions in Antiquity. I mean, the central conceit of the religion is that a Galilean peasant turned apocalyptic preacher, only recently executed by the Romans for sedition, was in fact God incarnated upon the Earth to work out metaphysical salvation for all human beings and defeat evil. That would have and did strike many Romans as downright bizarre, even completely insane.
But some Christians introduced an idea that was even more scandalous: that the creator of the cosmos itself was a psychotic, malevolent entity, and that our very world itself was a kind of prison, a trap meant to distract and torture. The origins of the concept of the malevolent Craftsman or Demiurge has been the topic of an ongoing series here on the channel, and in this episode, I want to examine some of the earliest Christian theologians on just that topic.
At Antioch, where Christians were first called themselves as such, we also find some of the first systematic Christian philosophers and theologians attempting to situate the salvific Christ event into the broader intellectual and religious terms of their day. But as history would unfold, these theologians would be remembered not as pioneers, but as heretics. Indeed, the fathers of the heresy that would come down to us and become known as Gnosticism. Let's explore some of these earliest Christian theologies: in Simon and Menander of Samaria, Saturninus of Antioch, and the mysterious founder of the so-called Sethians, or the Seed of Seth.
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But now, let's turn to the largely obliterated origins of Christian theology itself. Now, ironically, weirdly enough, reviled as the heresy known as Gnosticism. 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, this is an episode in a series attempting to document what was taken to be one of the most scandalous philosophical and theological notions of late Antiquity: that the creator of the cosmos was an evil entity, and that our world was a kind of prison, such that salvation took the form of knowledge, or gnosis, of that very condition, so as to allow us to well, escape, to get out of this physical prison back into our true home, the spiritual realm of the light.
The previous two episodes introduced us to the concept of the Demiurge as it was first developed in Plato, leading to the creation of an imperfect, but certainly not evil, world. Along with the Judean-Egyptian religious polemics that led to the association of the Israelite God Yahweh with the Egyptian god of chaos and foreigners, the god Set. Of course, the rising Jesus movement would see theological conflict within the emergent rabbinical establishment, leading, and by the composition of the Gospel of John around 100 of the Common Era, this led to nascent theological positions whereby the father of Jesus was not identical to the father of the Jews, who was associated in the Gospel of John with either the devil or the father of the devil, depending on how one reads John 8. Antiquity was read in both ways.
Further, as Christianity reached majority non-Jewish populations, the connection with the Torah, the values of the theological narratives of the Hebrew Bible, or the Old Testament, would become weakened, mostly among those Christian converts. So much so that theologians like Marcion, who wasn't Jewish, concluded that the creator of the Hebrew Bible was in fact not a god at all, but a tyrant of mysterious origins, with the father of Christ being the only authentic deity, along with Christ, and Christ having been sent, of course, to deliver us from the evil creator. Indeed, Marcion would be perhaps the first, first figure to produce something like a Christian canon of scriptures and work out a coherent theory of salvation history. With the exception of someone like Simon of Samaria, of course. This position was rejected by the proto-Catholic Church, and despite Marcionite churches surviving for centuries, at least out in the East, his movement would ultimately go down in history as a titanic heresy.
Now, to have one, whatever to win is in history, but to have one in history is no indicator of theological or philosophical truth. I mean, becoming the official imperial cult of the Roman Empire, does it make you right, even if it obliterates your enemies? But at least a couple of generations before Marcion would approach the church in Rome with a lot of money, similar theological developments would further lay the groundwork for what came to be known as Gnosticism and its concept of the malevolent Demiurge.
Indeed, Simon, a Samaritan theologian, would go down in history as just an awful sorcerer who attempted to buy the power of the Gospel, along with being the founder and the progenitor of all heresy, especially Gnostic heresy. Now, to be clear, I'm not going to be focusing on the enormous amount of legendary material that has grown up around Simon of Samaria, known of course to most of us simply as Simon Magus. I mean, I won't be covering that material in this episode, but that stuff is so juicy, I'm going to, I'm going to have to back to make a whole Simon Magus episode.
But it appears that Simon had his origins in the region associated with the Samaritans, an Israelite or Israelite-adjacent group who follow, and follow a version of the Torah with a cultic focus on Mount Gerizim, who again, survived down to this day, although in small numbers. It isn't clear that Simon himself was a Samaritan, but he did seem to have an active religious presence in the region around the same time as Jesus was active and John the Baptist was active over there in the Galilee. In fact, it now seems like he may have actually founded a kind of new religious movement in the region. In fact, parallel to John the Baptizer and to the Jesus movement, he would eventually make contact with the Apostles of the early Jesus movement and seems to have converted to their beliefs, perhaps in the interest of creating a consolidated religious movement. It's not really clear exactly what's going on in the Book of Acts, because the Book of Acts isn't exactly history, it's more like romantic historical fiction.
Whatever his agenda, he seems to have made an important impact on the early Jesus movement, such that the quasi-historical Nolla Acts mentions him at length, as do subsequent Christian legends, all culminating him with engaging in magical aerial combat with some of the Apostles in Rome, which Simon Magus needs to again have his own show. Again, I'll be focusing primarily here on Simon's theology, at least of what we can construct of it, not the admittedly wonderful and amazing legends that kind of prove that Catholics were a bit obsessed with this guy. I mean, he still living rent-free in their churches, legends.
But outside of those legends, Simon is primarily known in the heresiological literature as the arch-heretic, the heretic from which all Christian heresy spread, especially the so-called Gnostic heresy. Now, this kind of cuts in two directions at the same time. A point we should keep constantly in mind in this episode is that on the one hand, we should trust many of the reports that we get about people like Simon or Valentinus or other these folks. We should probably trust these reports about as far as we can throw them. They're ultimately polemical in nature, and they're actively trying to paint their enemies, their theological enemies, in the worst possible light. Thus, we get Simon as an evil, bribing sorcerer, might be a concept that we want to bracket, or at least hold at arm's length, especially since we don't have Simon's or his followers' account of what happened. For instance, in the Book of Acts.
But on the other hand, I really don't suspect that Irenaeus and Justin Martyr and the reputat and Epiphanius and Origen, all those guys, I don't really think they were just making stuff up out of whole cloth. And one example that kind of illustrates this is that for centuries, we only had Irenaeus's account of many so-called Gnostic theologies. Then the Berlin Codex and the Nag Hammadi library were discovered, and it turns out, if we're going to be honest, Irenaeus wasn't wildly off in many respects. And something similar, I think, may have happened to Simon.
As I mentioned, for centuries, Simon was universally held to be the progenitor of not just Christian heresy, but a very specific heresy that's come down to us to be known as Gnosticism. But we didn't really have anything even claimed to have been written by Simon. And so this claim just looked like more polemical genealogy, blaming all deviation on one dude, more than anything else. But then, at Mount Athos in 1842, a manuscript was found that contained a kind of new anti-heretical textbook, at least new to us, though books one and two remain lost. And it was described variously to Origen and Hippolytus of Rome. We, we don't know who wrote it, but this compendium of heresies also contains one of our only real potential glimpses into the actual theology of Simon of Samaria, primarily there in book six.
Now, while the text does interject its own commentary, we do get extensive quotations from a text, in fact, ascribed to Simon, now known as the Great Declaration, which is accompanied by a further commentary from a follower, it appears, of Simon, all bundled together with the other stuff written by the reputat. Now, did Simon actually compose the Great Declaration? A previous generation of scholars refused the idea, considering that it was simply all too philosophical and technical to have been composed by Simon the Samaritan, because he was just a sorcerer, you know. But this argument just seems silly to me, because it's not an actual argument, it's just an assertion.
So, whatever the truth of the matter is, we don't know for sure. But the reasons that I do think we have, I do think we can conclude that this may have in fact been written by Simon, for, for reasons that I'll cover as we go along, unpacking this amazing text, which, for whatever reason, doesn't really get a lot of play and sort of Gnostic interest. The text was apparently very complex, blending exegesis of the Hebrew Bible with Stoic, Neopythagorean, and Greek medical speculation, and largely takes the form of a kind of esoteric interpretation of the creation of the world and the primal human being as described in the Book of Genesis. So we get all the fun stuff: Stoicism, Neopythagoreanism, Bible, esoteric interpretation, of course.
Simon appears to have held that God was a kind of infinite mental fire, of which seven eons emerge as the subsequent days of creation: as mind, voice, reason, reflection, name, and thought, or sometimes wisdom for the seventh one. Here, that Stoic divine fire is met and combined such with the Torah of the idea that God is a consuming fire, there found in Deuteronomy, along with the Neopythagorean cosmology, such that a hidden monad becomes a diad and itself generates itself into the creation as numeration. The technical language betrays basically all of this. And it is in the image of wisdom that the human being is created.
Interestingly enough, though, the logos of this text is not associated with Christ, but with Moses. And this may be an actual indicator that Simon did in fact write this, or at least that it was a very early Christian composition, given that the idea of the logos would be given exclusively over to Christ in the aftermath of the composition of the Gospel of John in basically all of Christian theology. So this text seems to be earlier than the Gospel of John, and to make Simon a pretty good candidate for it.
The formation of the human being in the Garden of Eden is again taken to be a rather frankly marvelous allegorical account of the formation of the human fetus. The rivers and trees and boundaries of the Garden of Eden are taken to be the veins, arteries, umbilical cord, and amniotic sac. It's a story about how the human being is made. Further, the five books of Moses are further taken to detail this process, with Genesis detailing conception and sight, Exodus birth and hearing, Leviticus respiration and smell, Numbers speech and taste, and Deuteronomy synthesis and touch.
But the very physical creation of the body is also met with a spiritual creation of the human being: thought, or wisdom, along with mind. The primordial female and male are fused in the first human, such that, and to quote the translation of GRS Mead, "Hence they pair with each other, being one, for there is no difference between power and thought. From the things above is discovered power, and from those below, thought. In the same manner also, that which was manifested from them, although being one, is yet found as two. The male-female having the female in itself. Thus, mind is in thought, things inseparable from one another, which although being one, are yet found as two." You kind of get Hermes Trismegistus, Emerald Tablet vibes, "As above, so below" stuff there in the text.
But later Simoian thinking would have his divine female as thought, or wisdom, as conceived of creating a host of angels, who in turn would create the physical cosmos along with the human being's body. But the angels, not wishing to lose their thought mother, well, they rebelled and entrapped her in physical bodies. Our physical bodies. Thus, she's likened in the text to Helen of Troy here, the text riffing on Homer, much like the Bible, to discover esoteric truths. And like Helen, she must have been stolen away, and she must eventually return to her divine home. And this, of course, is the key to human salvation.
Indeed, we find in the text here a link to Jesus via Simon. For the same tale of the lost and refound thought, the lost and returned thought, found precisely in Christ's parable of the lost sheep and the Good Shepherd. In that the divine fire gave rise to the primal mind, and that we are all made in the image of thought, wisdom, we are thus able to connect back to the divine precisely through the self-specific power of knowing, of gnosis. The act of knowing that we are ultimately regions of the divine thought is thus a kind of theurgy, a kind of theosis, a becoming divine.
Thus, so much of the scandal of later Christians that Simon was deified by his followers, perhaps becomes a bit more clear here. Perhaps he did become God, or claim to become God, in the sense that he achieved the through conforming his mind to the primal mind and thought. But that feat wouldn't have been necessarily unique to Simon of Samaria. Rather, the Great Declaration makes it clear that anyone, everyone, can attain such a deified state. And thus, in this way, Simon of Samaria is not only interacting with, but he seems like he's deeply informing some aspects of the early Jesus movement.
Further, it seems that Simon recognized something in the teachings of Jesus via the early Apostles that he sought out conversion and became a Christian. All Christian texts, at least the early ones, admit this. The fact that only Christians seem to actually care at all about refuting and slandering him and his followers kind of also bears this out. No one cared but the Christians, the narcissism of minor difference stuff. Thus, it seems that Simon's theology was infused to some degree into early Christianity, with his cosmology, his mode of scriptural interpretation, and a specific theory of salvation via deification, not totally unlike that of Paul, who has the similar notion that through Christ, people are transformed into angelic-like beings with glorified bodies. They undergo a kind of theosis in a certain kind of way. I think Simon and Paul would have seen eye to eye in some ways.
Further, Simon of Samaria seems to have introduced something of early Trinitarian thinking, with the primal fire father, the feminine thought wisdom, and the divine primal child, typified by Simon or Christ. But you know, the Trinitarian deity becoming a little something of importance in the development of Christianity, it probably goes back to Simon of Samaria. Further, he developed a cosmology which describes the development of our universe and the eventual need for our salvation as divine thought in exile. Further, he develops the first system in which creation is emanated via a series of ontological pairs. That idea is going to feature largely and will continue to persist into both Sethian and ultimately Valentinian schools of Christianity. Finally, his soteriology, or theory of salvation, is truly Gnostic in the most literal sense of that word, something he also again shares with Paul, in that is coming to know and trusting in that knowledge that one's mind or soul is fundamentally divine in exile, such that we can return to that divinity itself as a process of theurgical deification.
That Simon of Samaria was associated with sorcery also may have just been because the rituals that he and his followers developed to achieve that salvation and thus were demoted to mere sorcery by his detractors. Recall that magic is just what they do, while what we do is always religion. That is always associated. Sorcery is a kind of rhetorical device, not a historical or theological descriptor of much value. One person's theory is another person's superstition and sorcery. Thus, when we remember him specifically as Simon Magus, that allows his enemies to forever speak through us, defaming perhaps the earliest Christian theologian, mystic, and ritual innovator. And I think the more that we can switch our language to Simon of Samaria, an early Christian, as opposed to Simon Magus, the heretic, we're all going to be doing a bit better history. Yeah.
I hear the question: This is all really Gnostic sounding, and perhaps it does bear on the origins of Christianity and Christian Gnosticism, and perhaps early Christian theology has a lot to do with Simon of Samaria. But there isn't much of talk here of an evil creator. There's not much of a malevolent Demiurge, which is kind of the point of these episodes. Yeah, that's apparently true of the Simoian Great Declaration. But notice what is there: the creator of the cosmos via the angels, some of which rebel and trap thought in the physical prison of the physical body, is not the same, of course, as the primal father being evil. But there's a homology. The structure for the evil creator is there, at least in embryo.
Wisdom, or Sophia as she'll be later, is thought being betrayed by her own angelic craftspeople, precisely as the ones who build this universe. That idea of proletarian angels doing all the work of the actual creation was of course also current in Jewish circles at the time, just by the way. That was a thing that a lot of people believed. And the idea that some angels would rebel against God and fall to become demons would eventually just straight up make its way directly into Christian doctrine and mythology. This all has its origins in many ways in Simoian theology. There we have many ideas that become orthodox, and some ideas that don't.
But this precise line of thinking would be expanded by another Samaritan, perhaps a follower of Simon, in Menander of Samaria. He seems to have held a combination of both positions: that the world was created by angels via the direction of the primal unknown God, such that some of those angels did in fact rebel, turning creation into a kind of prison. But Menander puts special interest not only on salvific knowledge, or gnosis, but also on baptism as a principle by which one sought to escape, got the power to escape the prison cosmos and all the demonic guards that lock us here. Indeed, his opponents seemed to have ascribed to him a teaching that the baptism done in the name of Menander would in fact make them literally immortal. Though I don't think that was actually his position. Rather, a bit like the Gospel of John, Menander probably thought that he was promising eternal spiritual life, freed from this prison of clay, very much in line with other Christian teachings of the time, with the focus on the ritual of baptism as a key to salvation.
This both places Menander of Samaria directly in the Christian circuit and shows that in the generation just after Simon of Samaria, who likely died sometime between 60 or 80 of the Common Era, we don't know, but at least Simoian-like theology was at work within a very specifically Christian community in Antioch, of course, one of the most early and central hubs in all of Christianity, and I think the third largest city in the Roman Empire at the time.
About a generation later, also at Antioch, we find the theologian Saturninus at work, similarly preaching an utterly unknown primal father deity who created the world through an agency of now seven powerful angels. Those angels would construct the world along with the primal human being, again relying on a kind of pun in Greek. They're reading the Hebrew Bible in Greek and not in Hebrew. The creation of the first light, or "phos," was actually the creation of a human being of pure light, "phos," from a higher divine image or model, very Platonic in this way. In love with this creation of pure light, those archangels sought to imitate it, and without reference to the model, and in using the dust of the earth, their creation was botched. They only managed to create something like a worm that merely wriggled about on the earth.
The human of light, however, took pity on this worm of a human and infused the being of dust with divine light, allowing them to stand up and tower above creation in reason, as thought. But the spark was not to hold in everyone. Some rejected the spark of light and they plunged into sin, such as the first murderer, Cain, and all of his spiritual descendants. But others, like the spiritual descendants of Seth, would recognize their inner divinity and ultimately go on to be reunited with the divine light for all of eternity. Again, the failed act of creation by kind of middling sub-creators would become one of the classic Gnostic motifs, along with the idea that the spiritual light was held on to by some of the ancestors of human beings, specifically the spiritual ancestors of Seth.
But there is a final dimension in the theology of Saturninus of Antioch that drives home our discussion. One of those angels responsible for the botched human creation, worm creature, was none other than Yahweh, the Israelite God. Here we have a subpar craftsman, a Demiurge, in the form of the Israelite God, now demoted to a kind of bumbling angel, creating in their own image, as opposed to the ideal divine image developed by the primal deity. Again, we only have a slight peek into these early Christians and Christianities, and exclusively often through the vantage point of their enemies. But Christians they were, with communities at Antioch and eventually in Alexandria and Rome. And yet, these brief glimpses are allowing us to see the emerging theology that sometime around the middle of the 2nd century would become Gnosticism, known to all of us and to the heresiologists.
But also, the idea that you came here for the idea of the horrible, malevolent Demiurge and its abomination of a cosmos prison, ruled over by the hideous Archons. That theology and worldview, it seems, would take full form downstream, perhaps of Simon and Menander of Samaria, and Saturninus of Antioch, but also in the demonization of Yahweh as Set in the Egyptian context, the Johannine notion that the father of the Jews was the father of the devil, in Marcionite theology, that the evil creator and the true God were distinct entities. And so far as we can tell, that theology mysteriously emerges sometime in the mid-2nd century as the theology of the enigmatic Sethian teacher. Indeed, whoever they were, is so mysterious that not even the heresiologists of their day knew their identity.
Recall that one of the rhetorical strategies of people like Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, the reputat, and the rest was to always name a so-called heresy after its inventor or leader. Thus, Valentinianism, or Marcionism, them simply being followers of Christ, and thus Christians as such, they were heretical. Carpocratians, followers of Carpocrates, not followers of Christ, Christians. But even the earliest heresiology, at least from the what we have, we've lost the Syntagma produced by Justin Martyr. The exact developer of this theology was lost by then, or unknown. Thus, its origins are mysterious, and we just know it now as Sethianism, or sometimes the Seed of Seth. But it would be in this school that we finally see developed the malevolent Demiurge, Yaldabaoth, in all of its hideous grandeur and terror.
Trying to pinpoint the where and the when of the origins of the Sethian teaching is extremely difficult, and frankly, just basically speculative. A date sometime in the mid-2nd century seems most likely, because well, Irenaeus is attacking the idea in the 180s, so we know it has to be before then. However, the where and the when probably are linked somehow. It's unlikely to have been initially, at least, a production of Alexandrian thought. Why? Typically, anti-Judaism is the result of social tensions with actual Judeans over theological topics. And these specific inversions, in general antagonism to Judaism, that is clearly there in Sethian theology, are probably actually tied to real theological strife. You can compare the kind of polemics that are going on in the Gospel of John. But an Alexandrian context is probably unlikely here, given the Roman pogrom that followed a Jewish uprising in the region that concluded in 117 and effectively ethnically cleansed the entire region of Jews in and around Alexandria. So there wasn't really many people to beef with in the mid-2nd century, Jewish-wise.
Thus, it seems much more like a Syrian context is likely. And given that we've have all this documented attention with Judeans in that population in that century, and similarly, Antioch is already producing both theologies which demote the Judean deity to a mere angel, they make the work of creation the task of angels, and are developing at least some of the notions that angels would go rogue and betray the divine light. We already have a lot of the ingredients that are going to make these ideas make a lot more sense. Thus, I would suspect, and scholars agree with me, that the Sethian teacher emerged in Antioch in the mid-2nd century, with their ideas quickly spreading to places like Alexandria and Rome, where they would be greatly expanded, and then communities will be established all over the Roman world, as we know it.
This idea of the malevolent Demiurge, as scandalous as it was, was extremely popular. Further, the earliest stratum of the Sethian teaching seems to have been some version of the text that we now know as the Apocryphon, or Secret Teaching of John, though definitely not in the form that's come down to us as we have it in the Berlin Codex of the Nag Hammadi Library. Specifically, Irenaeus seems to have access to something like the surviving short reduction of the text in Greek, though missing the developed sections riffing on Genesis 3:26, along with the framing device which interpolates the text as a revelation to John, the son of Zebedee. So it seems like the earliest layer of the Sethian teaching as a written document probably had more to do with the emergence of the fullness, or Pleroma, the fall of Sophia, and the creation of the cosmos by the demonic, primordial to both.
What the Sethian teaching most specifically contributes to the developing theologies that we've been discussing in this series so far is the origin of the dreadful Demiurge, something that's often just passed over in previous generations of theologians. You can think of someone here like Marcion, who describes the existence of the evil creator, but never really tells us where they come from. And of course, a later generation of Marcionites, folks like Aelius, will basically make the evil creator a kind of fallen angel. But again, that's a later development. Marcion himself, it seems, never really even describes where the evil creator comes from. And it seems like the Sethian teacher tries to make sense of that in the context of the larger process of salvation history.
Now, I've done a whole episode on the Apocryphon of John. If you want to check out that book more specifically, but it seems that in the Sethian teaching, we have what gets developed most so far is the idea of a kind of primordial Father, which emanates a primordial Mother, the famed Barbelo, which in turn gives rise to a world of Aeons, the Pleroma. Most importantly, Christ and Sophia are wisdom. Sophia, of course, famously, infamously, illicitly attempts to create something on her own, which gives rise to what the text calls an abortion, and that entity is hidden outside of the divine fullness, the Pleroma, and plunged into the material world, such that it declares in its ignorance, "I am the only God, and there is none like me," a direct quotation of Yahweh in the Hebrew Bible. This lion-serpent being, Yaldabaoth, clearly a theological mockery of the Israelite deity Yahweh in the Hebrew Bible, thus creates the physical world with the help of the demonic planetary Archons, or world rulers, most of whom again have names associated with the Judean deity.
Now, I've done an entire another episode on just the Archons. If you want to check that out, there's also a lot of development in the concept of the Archons in some theologies. Not even all of them are bad. In one theology, there's even a good guy Archon. But you can check out the Archon episode.
Now, what does this name mean, Yaldabaoth? The answer is, we don't know. It's probably quasi-Semitic in origin. It seems to have a kind of Aramaic construction, and it rings of Yalda, the child, and Bohu, a term that means something like chaos, but also you can hear "Sabaoth," meaning armies, but also maybe darkness, shame, the one who brings forth. It's perhaps the child of chaos, or the bearer of chaos. But there is virtually no consensus on the exact etymology of this strange name. And I suppose that's ultimately appropriate for such a nightmare of an entity. But in its rapacious ignorance, the Yaldabaoth concludes that again, it's the only God. And only is reminded frightfully so that it ain't the only God. Sophia repents. The physical human being is generated by the Demonic Cosmos Rulers with a smuggled inner divine nature, realizing the beauty and power of the divine origin of the true nature of the human being. Yaldabaoth attempts to imprison the human in the Garden of Delights, the Garden of Eden. Though these later sections, again, as I said, are probably later accretions of the original Sethian teaching, perhaps those later parts were actually Alexandrian in origin.
However, it's through the spiritual line of Seth that salvation is possible, in the form of gnosis, or knowledge of the real origins of the cosmos, and most importantly, how to escape it. And of course, it would be the pre-existent Christ that would bring this message down to Earth, with the Yaldabaoth and his evil Archons attempting and doing killing Jesus via the Jews, only for Christ to rise in glory following the defeat of this cosmos-crafting demon, thus paving the way, of course, for salvation for those literally in the know. It's not called Gnosticism for no reason, about the truth of the origins and destiny of physical and spiritual realities.
In effect, the Sethian teaching brings together elements from virtually every single strand we've been discussing in this series so far: the demonization of Yahweh, the inversion of Judaism, especially the law, the creator as a secondary entity which is ultimately imperfect or fallen, or just evil, and finally, how the coming of Christ reveals the means of salvation by coming to know, by coming to know about it, attaining gnosis, but also somehow that Christ has destroyed the status quo, flinging open the doors to redemption to maybe everyone, but at least the really truly spiritual people. While other variants of these teachings would prove attractive to some, it seems like the Sethian teachings were especially widely and deeply received by Christians all over the Empire and beyond.
Not only do we have widespread support for the long, rapid geographic diffusion of these teachings, both for the expansion of the central Sethian teaching as it's found in the Apocryphon of John, where translations are made into Coptic, at least two different translations are made, along with nearly a dozen known other Sethian texts, including ritual, polemical, and mythological scriptural texts of surprising depth and complexity. It's also clear that they had pioneered a sect-specific form of baptism and likely other rituals as well. By the 4th century, Epiphanius seems to have known about a half a dozen different Christian sects who had all adopted and transformed the Sethian teachings in new and innovative directions. It's that Sethianism became a kind of seedbed for lots of other Christian theologies.
They were, along with the followers of Simon of Samaria, the first Christian Trinitarians, and supported a coherent enough movement to earn the attack, the sustained attack of the early Catholics for centuries. That the Catholics felt the need to spend all this time and energy attacking them in long-form polemics clearly speaks to them as a rival of extremely serious consideration. And yet, at the core of their Christianity is the doubly scandalous acceptance of a crucified Messiah and a demonic cosmic creator, an idea so shocking that it earned not only the eye of the early Catholics, but also people like the pagan genius Plotinus. In fact, he comes out against the Sethians precisely because they're attending his 3rd century seminar in Rome, and he's learning about their philosophy, and he finds it frankly absolutely ghastly. I've done in a whole episode on Plotinus' attack on the Sethian teachings in a different episode, if you want to check it out, but they're even in Plotinus' philosophy seminar.
But the Sethian teacher introduces a philosophy into the ancient world that clearly had purchase. Perhaps the turmoil of that time made the belief in an evil creator appealing to a lot of people. Perhaps that's why there's wide interest now in the idea of the evil creator, simulation theory, why Gnosticism are born out of similar conditions. Now, maybe that's the reason why you're watching this episode. But while the Sethian teacher would introduce us to the serpent-lion Yaldabaoth, they were clearly not developing the idea in isolation, as this series has shown. Further, the Sethian teacher would not have had the final word on the nature of the malevolent Demiurge. This idea is going to very much get out of their hands in some ways, and another teacher would emerge, greatly modifying the extreme cosmic pessimism of the Sethian teacher. And that's where the series is going to go next: to the teachings of Valentinus and the Valentinian Gnostic, Gnostic concept of the Demiurge. So there, maybe we'll wrap up this series. Yeah, who am I kidding? It's not going to happen. Probably not.
The notion that creation, a reality, is the result of a horrid, demonic creator, really has legs in the world these days. It survives into the Middle Ages and all the way down to films like The Matrix. Jean Baudrillard, for his point, the guy that who philosophy inspired The Matrix, said that The Matrix was the kind of movie that only The Matrix itself would have made. So always love the post-structuralists and their humor. And again, even the Gnostic counting of someone like a Cthulhu in the mythology of H.P. Lovecraft. I mean, I'm going to be making this series forever, aren't I?
Yeah, again, I've been producing all of this content really aided by the scholarship of my friend and colleague M. David Litwa, whose book *Found Christianities* was an absolutely important help for this episode, really a great book and well worth checking out. He also has a number of very affordable, profoundly well-produced classes on just this kind of Gnostic material, if you want really deeper dives. He's even doing an upcoming live class on Gnosticism that I'm sure will be absolutely fantastic. I have links to his books and classes down below and I'd really encourage you to dive into them. Again, a single esoteric episode, I really appreciate you watching, but this is not an exhaustive survey of this material, and I'd really encourage you to dive deeper and support another fellow public-facing scholar educator. Of course, as I said, I'm not done with this series on the Demiurge. It's never going to end, and that alone is probably proof that the creator is indeed sus. Until next time, 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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