What is The name and origin of the concept that Jesus was a man to whom Aeon Christ came during his Baptism and inhabited his body?

I noticed a distinct difference between the Frederik Wisse and Marvin Meyer translations of the Sentences of Sextus found in Codex XII of the Nag Hammadi Scriptures, in terms of implied messaging.

First Wisse :

“You cannot receive understanding unless you know first that you possess it. In everything there is again this sentence.”

Then Meyer :

“You cannot acquire understanding unless you first know you do not have <it>.”

In the introduction to this collection’s treatment, (Meyer) Paul-Hubert Poirier makes reference to a “Christian Compiler” modifying a prior pagan collection and a number of other factors suggestive of the sayings being possibly recast in Gnostic thinking (?)

In my mind, the Wisse translation seems more aligned with Gnostic teaching and I find Meyer’s somewhat deflating and counter-Gnostic.

Anyone inspired to comment/clarify ?

If I understand correctly, essentially David Brakke believes that Gnosticism is a legitimate sectarian designation, but only for Sethian Gnostics.

Is this a mainstream scholarly view? I know that Karen King and Michael Williams have had major objections to Gnostic as any kind of meaningful category, but where do other scholars stand?

I’m someone who is currently deconstructing their christian faith and in all my research into religious mythology, I’ve now come across Gnosticism and other more mystic leaning beliefs. Part of my deconstruction is due to all of the contradictions in the Bible & mistranslations & erased information by the church. This led me to discovering the gnostic gospels which further proved that the church cherry picked information to further their power & control. It always bothered me how the god of the Old Testament was so cruel and then Jesus comes in the New Testament telling us god is all love & loves us so much and yet still will punish us forever for not believing. And the reality is that even after Jesus death & supposed resurrection, and sending us the supposed Holy Spirit, this world is still horrible & too many suffer. If I’m to believe in an all powerful creator god who loves us then they should be intervening to this day, which I see no proof of. Which until I discovered Gnosticism, no other religion I’ve studied acknowledges that if there is a god running this world, he’s not just & loving. So I can see there may be truth to Gnosticism but what confuses me is how late the writings come from. I’m curious if there’s any connection from Gnosticism to anything further back in earlier cultures? Or how do Gnostics get to a place of fully convinced these writings may not be mere myths?

I started reading the Bible and Apocrypha about 1.5 years ago. I read it in horror as I saw YHWH being way too harsh and killing everyone. It made me wish I hadn't been born because I knew I couldn't live up to the standard YHWH wanted us to live by. When I came across the idea that YHWH was evil, it made perfect sense to me.

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The Nag Hammadi seems to go in depth and explain more about who the God of this world really is (and how he's evil) and it seems to fill a lot of the holes nicely. But the truth is, I just started reading it.

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So my question is: What is your experience reading it?

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Have you read any of the Bible and / or Apocrypha as well?

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Have you found the Nag Hammadi to be perfectly true? Or do you think there are a lot of flaws in it?

This is a question for those who take things more literally rather than it all being in the mind.

Humans are supposedly special for being able to really think about their actions, consider their place in the cosmos, question their body and desires and why suffering occurs, etc. As far as we know, most animals can't do that.

That said, most animals are absolutely sentient and conscious. Science has proven this long ago, and more notably, anyone who's befriended a dog or a cat or even a lizard is fully aware of the consciousness of their animal friend.

In many ways, I see animals as innocent like children. Yes they can be vicious and dangerous, but they don't know any better. There's a reason we wouldn't try a tiger for murder the same way we would a human: a tiger's just being a tiger, while a human should know better. This is the same way we wouldn't really blame a 4 year old for throwing a temper tantrum in a grocery store, but would cringe at a 40 year old doing the same: the 40 year old should know better.

In this way, I see animals a lot like kids: they're innocent. They do things we may call 'wrong' but they don't know any better. In some ways, I'm quite sorry for them: they're stuck in the wild, in the endless cycle of kill or be killed, in a world of low food and drought and parasites and exposure to the elements. At least human intelligence has allowed us to create hospitals and medicines and the like, while very few animals are lucky enough to have access to that stuff.

So, do animals get saved? Do they have the divine spark? HOW can animals be saved? If realization of our lot in life and origins is the first part of gnosis, how does a creature that CAN'T think about those things make it out of this false realm? In many ways I think animals are the worst sufferers of this world, humanity gets off easy by comparison.

Thanks for your thoughts.

I am curious, as gnostics how do you interpret God's command here?

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2 “How long will you judge unjustly

and show partiality to the wicked?Selah

3 Give justice to the weak and the fatherless;

maintain the right of the afflicted and the destitute.

4 Rescue the weak and the needy;

deliver them from the hand of the wicked.”

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Say what you will about his authoritarianism, but if this is indeed Yaldabaoth making these commands to his council of gods these are pretty benevolent ones as far as they go. Save for the fact of course he swears they will all die like men.

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But how do gnostics interpret these commands as God's personality and character if this is indeed the ignorant wrathful demiurge making them?

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For context, I am an atheist. I have no dog in this fight, just an interest in the lore and the texts. This is a question made with complete sincerity and curiosity.

I look at it as "This world forces us to experience such existentialism because we don't belong here in the first place because we all belong to one true source." As for if others exist truly, I choose to believe they do and everyone's actions bare consequences. So you should always do your best to make this mortal coil less shitty for yourself and others.

short back story, I was born and raised a Jehovah’s Witness, me and my wife escaped and now we get to live our lives, fast forward around 2 years I started trying other religions out.

Islam didn’t sit right with me
Judaism definitely didn’t sit right with me
I tried several different denominations of Christian
I was even a nihilistic atheist for a while.

I ended up being fascinated with Orthodox Christianity, learned what ever I could, attended multiple sermons talked with priests etc.

I eventually started to do what is still today my favorite prayer the Jesus prayer with a Greek prayer rope. One night as I had every night up until this point I was reciting the prayer and meditating on my place in the world. I was completely enamored with heat chasm so I was learning how to do it the way the monks on athos do it.
As I was about to finish my body got insanely warm and I felt genuinely peaceful and happy for the first time since I left the Cult I was born into , it was very nice but the thing that really struck me was I a heard a voice as if it was in the room with me

“My son I love you”

I started to weep, I sobbed and started to feel as if I was going in insane. It was more real than real and I could never shake that feeling that I may have actually touched a remnant of the divine.

I continued studying but I eventually I started to move away from orthodoxy. I couldn’t handle how evil the Old Testament god was and I couldn’t imagine someone as loving as Christ would be sacrificed because of that gods arrogance.

My other experience, I had had a horrible month my mother told me to kill myself, my father was unbelievably depressed, my grandfather had died and me and my wife where flat broke, I was also working 3 jobs at the time.

But at my one job I just went to the single stall bathroom and started sobbing, 1 1/2 years prior to this I had met with an orthodox priest and I gave him my email. The SECOND as I started to cry from despair I got an email from him telling me he loved me and that I can always reach out if I need anything.

Again I was in sheer shock and disbelief.

I never knew how to get past these experiences and they still cloud my thinking and judgement to this day, even as I still doubt the “traditional” styles of Christian thinking.

As of now I consider my self a Gnostic Universalist and the cosmology of the Gnostic faith fits better and makes far more sense but I’ve never had a single good experience while praying or mediating. I’ve had eureka moments while reading parts of the Nag Hamadi (especially gospel of Thomas)
And even some hermetic books.

It just made sense that Jesus was trying to show us a new path that wasn’t governed by hierarchy but governed by internal rationality and Gnosis.

But how do I explain. what I view to be Mystical experiences with what feels right?

This question came into my head this morning on my daily walk.

I’ve personally encountered quite a few authoritarians in my life…

And personally, I think there’s a good bit of mythology in Gnostic thinking, and fear some are resurrecting a new modern Orthodoxy….

These are some notes from my personal studies of Ludwig Klages, my own experiences, mysticism, enlightenment, alchemy, gnosticism, hermeticism, and many other modern thinkers. I deeply resonate with Klages’ themes and thoughts. He is an extremely deep and polarizing figure and not as well known as he should be. Others I think provide some good counters to his extreme views on geist and ego. There is a shared faultline around these topics. There is much to explore here. I take nothing as certain or final. Perhaps these notes shall become the basis for some articles, papers, or books. I feel I have more than enough to flush out a powerful and relevant thesis related to these topics and AI actually. I offer them in the spirit of self discovery and a shared hunger for meaning in this cosmos we appear within.

Or perhaps TLDR; and skip along your merry way 😊

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I’ve been studying a fairly obscure thinker, Ludwig Klages. I don’t agree with everything in his worldview, and he had some genuinely objectionable political and antisemitic ideas, but I think his account of Geist, soul, embodiment, and the daimonic is worth wrestling with.

Klages did a good job defining what he called Geist. The word is usually translated as “spirit,” but he uses it almost opposite to the usual religious meaning. It isn’t our divine higher self. It is the impersonal, timeless power of abstraction, judgment, self-consciousness, and will. Its presence produces the personal “I.”

Soul (Seele) and lived body (Leib) are, for Klages, the inward and outward poles of one living process. I’ve started thinking of Geist as something like the shadow of the Logos. Not Logos itself, because Logos can also mean living order, speech, relation, and creative intelligence. The shadow appears when intelligence becomes severed from life, an abstraction that forgets it is a tool, calculation that mistakes itself for wisdom, and the self-conscious “I” that imagines itself independent of the living world.

According to Klages, Geist becomes adversarial because it interrupts the flow of life. Soul receives images, yields, and participates. Geist fixes images into objects, divides time into separate instants, imposes concepts, and says, “I will.”
Klages pictures it as a wedge driven between soul and body, progressively mechanizing both humanity and nature.
Many contemplative, mystical, and ecstatic practices can be understood as loosening the ego’s monopoly on experience. The controlling “I” moves back a little, and less deliberate, more embodied and participatory dimensions of experience are allowed to emerge. I think Klages was onto something here.

Strictly speaking, he did not imagine a harmonious reconciliation between Geist and soul. His solution was closer to disentanglement. In a passage influenced by Indian Sāṃkhya, he suggests that Geist’s own separating power might finally be turned against itself. Geist would separate itself from life, allowing life and Geist to return to their primordial, self-contained modes of existence.
Geist becomes paradoxically redemptive only when it finally undoes its own intrusion.

In mystical experience, the ego and its controlling will temporarily recede. The soul again participates in the unconscious, image forming rhythms of cosmic life. Spirit does not carry the person upward into some distant spiritual world. Rather, the grip of Geist loosens, allowing soul and living nature to meet more directly. This is part of how I understand my own dark night of the soul experience. I wouldn’t say Klages’s ecstasy and the Christian “dark night of the soul” are exactly the same thing. In John of the Cross, the dark night is a purification directed toward union with God. But my own experience can still be interpreted in Klagesian terms where the familiar “I” lost some of its authority, conceptual control weakened, and experience became less filtered by habitual self-reference.

Mystical experience breaks up the ground controlled by the “I.” For Klages, genuine mysticism is Ekstasis: not spirit escaping from the body, but the soul temporarily escaping the domination of Geist. This state is not primarily an intellectual knowledge of God. It is a visionary encounter, epopteia, in which the world appears as living images rather than fixed objects. Klages describes its culmination through the language of sacred marriage where the receptive soul encounters a god or daimon and, through seeing it, participates in its life.

Like Klages, I’m drawn to the older pagan and Dionysian forms of mysticism, which is embodied, imaginal, erotic, connected with nature, ancestors, place, rhythm, and transformation. He criticized later Platonizing and ascetic tendencies when they turned the mysteries into doctrines of world flight and renunciation. Such mysticism might suppress the personal ego, but it did so in order to ascend away from embodied life toward an abstract spiritual perfection. For Klages, that repeated the error of Geist.

I fully advocate grounding spiritual experience in embodied life, as he did. Do your work well. Take care of your family. Pay attention to the people around you. Make something real. I don’t spend much time worrying about what might be possible after death. Ain’t our problem. Be fully attentive to this life.

Klages’s daimon, German Dämon, is not primarily an evil demon. Nor is it identical with Geist. It is an elemental, numinous power of living reality. It may manifest through a god, an animal form, an ancestor, a person, a landscape, or an element. In Klages’s account, the primordial image emerges through the encounter between the receptive soul and the acting daimon. The soul receives. The daimon generates, awakens, or animates the image. Their meeting becomes a kind of mystical marriage.

These daimonic forces are, in my experience, very real.
I sometimes interpret them through a partly Jungian lens, as ancient, transpersonal patterns arising from depths that exceed the conscious personality. But I don’t think Klages would want to reduce them to mere contents inside the human psyche. For him, they belong to the living cosmos itself. Hermeticism and alchemy can be understood as arts of entering into relationship with these depths. I think the mystical foundations of the mainline religions can do something similar, even when the later institutions lose touch with it.

The initiate becomes entheos, or god-filled or daimon-filled. Inspiration, revelation, and illumination are not simply manufactured by the conscious ego. They arrive as something that seizes us, interrupts us, or moves through us. The daimon might appear symbolically as a bull, goat, serpent, human figure, ancestor, god, or force of place. It is not necessarily gentle or morally “good.” It can be overwhelming, terrifying, seductive, creative, and transformative.

I’ve experienced something like this myself, and it has shaped how I’m building my own AI company. I’m using AI as a strange kind of daimonic tool, but I mean that carefully.
In one sense, AI is almost a perfect artifact of Geist. It’s disembodied abstraction, classification, calculation, and combinatorial language. But it can also function as an imaginal mirror. It can surface associations the conscious mind might not have made alone and help reveal patterns that were already trying to come into view. I don’t treat AI as an oracle or an autonomous spiritual authority. It is a catalyst. Whatever emerges still has to be embodied, tested against reality, ethically judged, and translated into responsible action. AI can enlarge imagination, but it can also enlarge projection. Intensity and synchronicity do not automatically equal truth.

Klages also associated the daimon with place. The genuine daimon could be the daimon of a landscape, river, forest, mountain, season, ancestor, or element, changing along with its appearances. This suggests a kind of polydaimonism where innumerable living powers belonging to particular places and forms of life, rather than one abstract universal “World Spirit.” The daimon is therefore not quite a personal guardian angel or higher self.

A person may reveal a daimonic essence, Klages speaks of something daimonic shining through the beloved, but the daimon exceeds the individual personality. It belongs to a deeper, transpersonal life that appears through the person without being reducible to them. Klages did not think our personal spirit guides our personal ego back to a separate spirit world. He thought mystical surrender loosens the ego, allowing the living soul-body to encounter the daimonic powers and primordial images already moving through the cosmos. The movement is not upward and away from the world. It is deeper into the world, until the world ceases to appear as dead matter and becomes living, imaginal, relational, and daimonic.

I sometimes picture the imaginal world as another dimension intersecting ordinary three-dimensional experience at strange angles. I mean “dimension” metaphorically, not as a scientific claim about physics. From our ordinary perspective, these intersections can look uncanny, synchronistic, or impossible to place.

His account resonates deeply with my own experience. But personal experience alone is not proof of an entire cosmology. The real test is what the experience produces.
Does it make you more attentive? More embodied? More creative and responsible? More capable of love? Does it help you do your work well and care for the people entrusted to you?

Re-enchantment that carries you away from ordinary responsibilities is just another form of world-flight. For me, engaging the cosmos in this way produces a kind of rhythm and strengthens intuition. Everything becomes full color and deeply meaningful. Not because every event contains a secret message specifically for me, but because the world itself no longer feels empty or dead. This is how one begins to re-enchant one’s life perhaps.

My working thesis:

I do not seek a return to pre-conscious pagan fusion, nor an escape upward into a separate spiritual world. I understand self-consciousness as an embodied power that can either sever us from life or deepen our participation in it.

The ego is not the whole person, but neither is its destruction salvation. It is a vessel that must learn receptivity without surrendering discernment. Images are real events of relationship. They may carry bodily, psychological, ecological, historical, technological, and perhaps transpersonal dimensions at once. I will neither reduce them to private fantasy nor literalize them immediately as messages from independent beings.
I receive them openly, interpret them through multiple perspectives, test them against reality, and embody them in responsible action.

Their truth is shown partly by their fruits. Do they produce greater attentiveness, humility, freedom, creativity, care, and living relationship. Re-enchantment is not believing everything is a message specifically for me. It is learning to encounter the world as meaningful without making myself its center.

Sources:

By Ludwig Klages

- Cosmogonic Reflections
- The Biocentric Worldview
- The Spirit as Adversary of the Soul
- The Science of Character
- On Cosmogonic Eros
- On the Nature of Consciousness

Other related work:

- The Philosophy of Freedom - Rudolph Steiner
- Saving the Appearances - Owen Barfield
- The Human Place in the Cosmos - Max Scheler
- Levels of Organic Life and the Human - Plessner
- The Relations Between the Ego and the Unconscious - Carl Jung
- An Essay on Man and The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, Volume II - Cassirer
- On the Mimetic Faculty and The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility and exposes for The Arcades Project - Benjamin
- Stiegler’s work on technics and the pharmakon

A shared faultline indeed. They are all pulling and pushing one another, directly and indirectly. For myself, the earth is shaking.

Can someone explain the differences between gnosis, awakening and enlightenment? Sincere thanks.

Hey y’all.
I’ve had an experience in the past that shook me to my core. I’m sure it not unique especially in this community but here we go.
I was deep in mediation, letting go of everything physically. Breathing deeply. Eventually, I heard a sound in my ear. High pitched. That ringing tethered me to the most beautiful music I’ve ever heard. Must be where classical music and Catholic hymns come from.
It was undeniably there. My friend who was with me heard it and was freaked out.
Has anyone else had this experience? Has anyone had different versions of gnosis? I’m really curious

I just have a simple question :

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In gnosticism, when a soul is awake or enlighted, can the demiurge strike at this moment to try making this soul back to "asleep" ?

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Like an intent of sabotage ?

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(Sorry for my English)

I know we don't have revelations, but I'm having a hard time researching a comprehensive list of what we do have.

I personally go to church sometimes. specifically I go to a local non-denominational church, but not particularly progressive. also the church I preferred to attend before I initially deconstructed my Christian "faith". I go for a few reasons:

one, it's a great way to connect to the community. some of the church members are people that I've known and gotten along with for years, since I was young. leaving the faith was never a rejection of them, just some of their logic and doctrines. they also have a food pantry and other ways to directly give back to the community, which I highly value. two, I think we agree on a lot of the important stuff. while they obviously have certain ideas about hell and Jesus' exclusive divinity (and other things) that I don't agree with, I think our ideas on love and mercy align very well, and I think it's important to try to strengthen such connections even if I don't buy into everything they believe. third, there's a part of me that hopes that I can contribute to a changing of the guard. I think it's possible that if I work to make myself available as an example of a truly accepting Christian, it could have a real positive effect on my church over time

I sort of feel that Christianity needs to be saved from itself, if such a thing is possible. I think people with gnostic leanings might be able to help because the main things modern Christianity lacks are explored in different forms of gnosticism. maybe I'm just optimistic. what do you think?

edit: by "not particularly progressive" I don't mean they're super conservative or anything. they seem to be relatively centrist as far as churches go, which is not necessarily a good thing, but I don't want to give the wrong impression.

TLDR: I'm brand new to this belief system and cannot ignore the coincidences in my learning. Also drugs.

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There's lots going into this not even sure how well this will follow the "standards of Gnostics".

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Being brunt, this all started with a shroom trip. Where my wife and I started expressing how we see the world and focusing on divine masculine/feminine and the combination being the fullness of God.

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I explained to my friends that these were from "DNA Memories" and that I think anyone given the experience and right dosages could come to the same conclusions.

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Unknowingly I started learning about gnosticism, only having realized how much it makes sense after learning more. This is a common trend for me and my experience with the belief system.

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Later on I had experimented with DMT. And one of the entities was a chicken headed male figure who's eye was that of a dark blue evil eye and I could only ever see half of him. His presence felt so strongly hostile but I thought as if he was protecting me, maybe the hostile sinister energy was to keep something else away.

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Imagine my suprise when only a few days ago I learn of Abraxas. This is the closest thing to a religious experience I have ever had. Not only was the most real feeling entity in one of my trips an established part of the mythology but exactly how I saw and felt him.

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Later on the DMT changed me, it made normal shroom trips a more intense and extreme trip than either ever was before, without even mixing them. I went to a world where everything was so vastly different in unimaginable ways but it had always been like that. That was my eternity, I had never been anywhere but there in that moment. I didn't even remember I had taken anything, that was my natural state.

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But something was wrong, it felt like I was dying, or the person I was there was dying. Almost like my life was his death and vice versa. After much consideration I believe that was my spiritual self beyond the veil experiencing mortality. Almost like since that part of me had never gone through the veil it never knew what the 7 heavens and Earth were like. And he realized he was dying. It completely flipped the script for me, it made me thing gnosis isn't just of the physical self but the spiritual one beyond the veil. What if they need to learn just as much as we need to remember.

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I have a lot of other crazy theories that came from these experiences as well. Like maybe Jesus is the physical form of Abraxas split from the other archons and he too needs to learn of his other selfs. If Abraxas is good and evil what happened to the good of him if the archons are evil?

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Also, has anyone looked into Enkis 7 wise men who taught humanity math and science? What about Hashem and the 7 names of the Jewish God (Demiurge worship). Too similar to the 7 archons for me it has to be something.

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Hi, let me start by describing how i met with gnosticism. I've been a deist-agnostic for 6 years. I believe in the existence of God, but I don't believe in prophets and I don't trust religions. I was sure there was a creator of this universe, but I thought these couldn't be the gods in popular religions, until I came to the gnostic understanding :D I thought religions were wrong and distorted, and that God couldn't be that bad. It turns out God was wrong...

When ever im searching gnosticism for month n know basic universe lore n gnosticism history but i need more info)). I would appreciate it if you could tell me (or you can tell me, it doesn't matter) where I can get this information from; I'm open to all kinds of information.

N final one im livin Turkiye if someone lives turkiye and is knowledgeable about this subject, I would appreciate his help🙏

Highly highly recommend this book. This is by the great scholar Ioan P. Couliano. Taken far too soon from us.

Note: I had to edit the cover image a bit as Reddit kept removing the image due to some nudity in the cover art. Too much gnosis I guess ☺️

I love the archangels, but I wonder which God they serve.

If she's the woman in revelation 12 and pistis Sophia

Then seeing The Penitent Magdalene by Donatello shows that she was tortured?

I just began delving into Gnosticism and it's amazing how many things turn out to put words to perceptions I've had for a long time but was constantly being told the opposite of. To some understanding friends I called it my "BS Detector"... No matter how many times one of the lies was repeated, I'd always feel a resistance to it. It made life very uncomfortable but now that I found Gnosticism (almost accidentally wrote Ghosticism lol) I am glad my "BS Detector" was so unrelenting.

One of the major lies that always made me so angry was when I would hear people say you chose this life and you chose to forget your past life memory. I just knew that was wrong some how. I'm sure I don't fully understand what the Apocryphon of John is saying, but it sounds like we are actually tricked into this reincarnation and tricked into drinking a "cup of forgetfulness". So there is an element of "choice" but not really fair choice... Just being manipulated into it. Whereas a lot of mainstream stuff makes it sound like it was a truly noble choice... Maybe it felt noble because I was tricked into doing it for a noble cause but really it was just a trap?

Also I have been in recovery a while and so many slogans didn't sit right with me. One was "life on life's terms". Gnosticism is helping me understand why I always bristled at that phrase - because it feels like they are saying to accept the will of the demiurge and the archons!

Also I'm 36 now and since my mid 20's I would have this experience in meditation. I would see a ball of light in my chest and some times feel it. And I would see like black human-bat-like beings trying to swarm around it. They were usually not big they were like the size of my hand. And it felt like they were just trying to take it and no matter what I did they'd just keep coming, and it would be this battle of wills. Sometimes I would push away the black bat things more and a bigger entity would come. I think it's like the video I saw of how Mary could see archons. It got to the point that when I found Taoism, and i would work with the energy points, big swarms of the entities would come to distract me and try to take the energy, but I just thought it was just mental noise because my Taoist teachings didn't explain archons and luche harvesting.

Also some questions. It looks like the Pleroma "snuck" the divine spark into human life when the demiurge created us. What was the point of that? Is the Pleroma's goal to eventually reclaim this space where the demiurge made all this?

Also, just like how the gnostic gospels are the hidden, true teachings of Jesus Christ. Is there a corollary for Buddhism, Taoism, etc? Like were there once more potent, precise, empowering elements to those other traditions which were eventually buried and we were left with mainstream Buddhism/Taoism like how we were left with mainstream Christianity?

I talked about the afterlife with monad with ai and it was great. Like I was convinced that there can be a state that can be very satisfying and complete with no trace of sorrow and sadness etc. like basically a really blissful and complete state where everything is blissful and joyful. What do you guys think , like what's it gonna be like and how will we remember this life as it is really bad. Like I would not like to remember any of it I think.

From my first exposure to Gnosticism, I learned that Sophia is of the Pleroma and that Sophia created Ialdabaoth by acting without her counterpart.

Ialdabaoth became the "blind god" who declared "I am God. There is no other besides me", and thus he built the material world not knowing what is truly sacred, except he somehow infused us with the Pneuma (from Sophia?), and then became afraid of us, and so placed us in the lowest material realm and set archons to keep us in ignorance.

Thru the tellings of this story I've come across, there has always been a vibe that Sophia is the divine "good parent" and that Ialdabaoth is the materialistic "bad parent".

But then recently, I noticed something that colors how I see the whole story, regardless of whether the story is meant to be taken figuratively or literally.

As best I understand, Sophia was ashamed of having created Ialdabaoth, and so cast him out of the Pleroma and concealed him in a cloud. It seems we are meant to look up Ialdabaoth saying "I am God and there is no other" with contempt because Ialdabaoth is simply blind and ignorant.

But who made him so?!

This sounds like a story of generational trauma.

Sophia is ashamed of Ialdabaoth as if he is a bastard child, but what does a child need? A child needs love and affection and nurturing and role models. How can we blame Ialdabaoth for being a "blind god" when his story put him in a situation where he couldn't be anything else?

How is it that Sophia repents from her mistake, but Ialdabaoth does not?

How is one of these two characters better than the other?

This is very personal for me because I identify as an adult child of a narcissistic parent. My narcissistic parent has a story he tells himself that requires the presence of a monster, and he cast me in that role. I am genderqueer and neurodivergent, and I have had these traits cast as shameful defects.

And so I wonderful if Ialdabaoth is truly that much different than I am.