Archona

If God made us in his image, isn’t it only natural that we make him in ours?

That is a very deep statement (and yes, I coined it, right now)– one that will be the focus of this post.

I am writing a fiction novel right now– am currently working on the 10th chapter (formerly the 11th, before I opted to cut the 1st chapter out and make it an independent work– a prequel of sorts).

This novel, “Essence of the Soul”, is about a spiritual journey to find the mysterious Essence, which is believed to be the root of everything– the ultimate source of “Life, the Universe, and Everything” (yes I know that’s a quote from Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, but I just had to use it!)

Anyway, my story is somewhat inspired by Gnostic philosophy. Well… this isn’t explicitly the case– after all, the aspects of  Gnosticism that are in the book are ones that I ‘independently’ thought of intuitively, before I actually knew anything about Gnosticism. So despite the book essentially being inspired by Gnosticism, it is for the most part completely original.

But for the sake of having a parallel to draw by which to better portray these things (which I have yet to express adequately in the book, as it is incomplete), I will paraphrase Gnostic mythology:

In the Gnostic creation story, Sophia the Essence, from which all as came into being.

Sophia is the one true God– and is perfection itself. However, although Sophia is perfect in nature, Sophia is imperfect in Essence, because she desires to manifest herself into Form that she might appreciate herself.

Thus, Sophia is herself a paradox: Because her very nature is perfection, she must be formless, because anything that has form is imperfection (Form itself is finite, thus being corrupt and imperfect in nature. At the same time however, Sophia desires to become corrupt, that she might achieve Form.

Although Gnostic philosophy (as far as I know) does not acknowledge this, I believe that Jesus Christ suffered from the same dilemma, also being perfect but wanting to attain Form.

*note that I am not using the word “physical” in conjunction with “Form”. This is because Form is the progenitor of the physical realm; “Form” does not refer to just physical form– it also refers to existence itself. According to this line of thought, that of course means that both Sophia and Jesus technically “don’t exist”, because there is no Form by which to define their existence. It’s unfortunate that the English language lacks the ability to properly explain spiritual concepts*

Both Sophia and Jesus existence because in order for there to be perfection for either, there must Balance. One could say that Balance itself is in it’s own right an even higher God, but because that God can only “exist” when Sophia and Jesus become one (which is impossible, even at the spiritual level), such an assertion would be meaningless.

So Balance only exists as an Ideal, as are Jesus and Sophia, albeit to a lesser extent.

Sophia’s nature is Positive, whereas Jesus’s Nature is Negative.

note: this is not to say that Sophia is “good”, whereas Jesus is “evil”– anyone familiar with Taoist philosophy should know that neither good or evil exist– there is only “Balance”, and the lack thereof.

In my belief, “Positive” refers to Creation, and Manifests itself through Change. Thus, depending on the way you look at it, Sophia is the source of all creation, although she herself did not create us, which will be explained later on.

Negative refers to Relativity, and Manifests itself through Control. Jesus is the source of Relativity, which allows us to appreciate what has been created (indirectly) by Jesus (because Jesus is by nature perfect, he cannot control everything– this will also be explained a bit later.)

Neither Change or Control can allow appreciate of anything independently; rather, appreciation requires a combination of both of these. It could then be said that to achieve maximum appreciation requires a *perfect* balance between Change and Control, which of course is impossible.

Uncontrolled Creation is known as Chaos, and does not have a form (something that constantly changes is formless by nature).

On the other hand, Relativity cannot exist without Change, as without there are no changes (and thus no standards by which to appreciate Relativity.

In Freudian psychology, Change is fueled by desire, and manifested in the Form of the Id.

Control on the other hand is fueld by the identity and perception, and is manifested in the Form of the Ego.

note that in the Gnostic model (which I adhere to), Jesus is the Father, and Sophia is the Mother.

Here’s the fun part:

Both Sophia and Jesus needed to manifest themselves (Sophia to create, and Jesus to control this creation) but paradoxically could not. In addition, because a true union between them was not possible, anything that they created would be imbalanced in nature.

Because they (Sophia and Jesus) are inherently opposite in nature, they “essentially” cancel each other out. The reasoning for this is somewhat related to the “Uncertainty Principle“. One layman’s rendition of the Uncertainty principle, is that the question and the answer in relation to any given thing cannot co-exist, because they cancel each other out.

If Jesus is the question (what limits knowledge to be appreciated), and Sophia is the answer (formless knowledge), then it’s only natural that they could not coexist, at least non coexist with arbitrary precision (e.g. union, which I refer to by the more appropriate and specific term “nexus”).

This implies that Jesus is the source of Control (what limits) and Sophia is Chaos (knowledge without form). This last part makes sense of certain things, as Sophia itself means “Wisdom” (Knowledge), and the Demiurge (the bastard son of Sophia) is also known as Yaldabaoth, “Son of Chaos”.

*note: there are certain aspects of Gnostic philosophy that I am not familiar with:

[copied from wikipedia]:

Sophia originally fell from grace because she tried to emanate without her syzygy (Jesus Christ) or, in another tradition, because she tries to breach the barrier between herself and the unknowable Bythos.

After cataclysmically falling from the Pleroma, Sophia’s fear and anguish of losing her life (just as she lost the light of the One) causes confusion and longing to return to it. Because of these longings, matter(Greek: hylē, ὕλη) and soul (Greek: psychē, ψυχή) accidentally come into existence. The creation of the Demiurge (also known as Yaldabaoth, “Son of Chaos”) is also a mistake made during this exile.

Gnostic myth recounts that Sophia (Greek, literally meaning “wisdom”), the Demiurge’s mother and a partial aspect of the divine Pleroma or “Fullness,” desired to create something apart from the divine totality, and without the receipt of divine assent.

In this abortive act of separate creation, she gave birth to the monstrous Demiurge and, being ashamed of her deed, she wrapped him in a cloud and created a throne for him within it. The Demiurge, isolated, did not behold his mother, nor anyone else, and thus concluded that only he himself existed, being ignorant of the superior levels of reality that were his birth-place.

The Demiuge is the failed attempt by Sophia to manifest her existence in appreciable Form.

That Form, which is also known as the Demiurge [literally “public worker”], went on to create the physical world in the image of his mother (Chaos).

The Demiurge, being the product of corrupted knowledge in a false-controlled form, ignorantly emanated himself in the incomplete image of Sophia. Emanation, from the Latin “emanare”, “meaning to flow from”, the unresolvable paradox that was God resulted in a a spiritual pipe being proverbially broken.

These false-emanations resulted in the creation of the Archons–servants of the Demiurge (who himself is considered an Archon, also being a corrupted emanation of Sophia). The Archons created the physical world, and continued to emanate compulsively, culminating in the emergence of humans, a complicated mix of chaos and control.

For this reason, humans are born with an inherent desire to emanate (to reproduce something of our own image), that we might appreciate ourselves, just as Sophia emanated the Demiurge.

As humans, we have lost most of what qualities were inherited from Sophia, but what we still keep some;

These qualities take the form of what we have come to know as “intuition”.

Sophia, being the emanation of desire, is the source of this part of the Demiurge’s nature, so when we were ‘created’ (or should I say, “born”), the source of our desire is Sophia, with the corrupted forms of desire known as “instinct” and “intuition” being acquired from the Demiurge.

Now here’s where Jesus comes in:

The Garden of Eden is a tale not just limited to the Christian and Jewish Bibles, but known to many different cultures all over the world, including indigenous ones that are largely isolated of foreign contact.

The Gnostic creation story is very lengthy, so I’ll just include the part regarding Jesus: (I’ve edited the following so that you will know when they are talking about Jesus)

Then came the wisest of all creatures, who was called Beast [Jesus, aka the Serpent]. And when he saw the likeness of their mother Eve he [Jesus] said to her, “What did God say to you? Was it ‘Do not eat from the tree of knowledge’?” She said, “He said not only, ‘Do not eat from it’, but, ‘Do not touch it, lest you die.'” He said to her, “Do not be afraid. In death you shall not die. For he knows that when you eat from it, your intellect will become sober and you will come to be like gods, recognizing the difference that obtains between evil men and good ones. Indeed, it was in jealousy that he said this to you, so that you would not eat from it.”

Now Eve had confidence in the words of the instructor [Jesus]. She gazed at the tree and saw that it was beautiful and appetizing, and liked it; she took some of its fruit and ate it; and she gave some also to her husband, and he too ate it. Then their intellect became open. For when they had eaten, the light of knowledge had shone upon them. When they clothed themselves with shame, they knew that they were naked of knowledge. When they became sober, they saw that they were naked and became enamored of one another. When they [Adam and Eve] saw that the ones who had modelled them had the form of beasts, they loathed them: they were very aware.

[From Wikipedia]: the Serpent in the Garden of Eden is depicted as a hero sent by Sophia to guide mankind towards enlightenment.

Jesus then, being the male counterpart of Sophia, takes the form of the Serpent, freed us from the ignorance imposed on us by the Demiurge and his servants the Archons (in the above passage they are called “the authorities”.

It is at this point that mankind can achieve gnosis, which transcends the intuition that he inherit from Sophial; the corrupted form of gnosis is known as “logic”.

Thus just as we inherit intuition from Sophia, we inherit logic (from which philosophy– and ultimately, gnosis is derived) from Jesus.

*note this post is wayyy too long, and in my efforts to explain that which required have caused me to go overboard; oh well :p

now to that real focus of this post: Archona

I was talking with a friend the other day about Archons, and was reminded of one crucial aspect of all this. Just as the Archons created us (our material form), we create our own Archons [e.g. Archona].

As I said at the beginning of this post:

If God created us in his image, isn’t it only natural that we create him in ours?

Archona are the spiritual manifestations of the self, driven to become God by creating him as the extension of ourselves.

To understand this, you must first understand magic. Contrary to popular opinion, magic is not a lost art– it is merely the retrospective name given to what is now known as many other things, and might collectively be called “science”.

Yes, magic and science and magic are essentially the same thing in essence, as they are both built upon the same foundation, which is the capture and control of spiritual energy.

The only real difference between the two is that magic is more primitive; science is a more sophisticated form of magic, essentially. I’ll go into this in more detail in my post Magic versus Science.

That being the case, we use both magic (through intuition) and science (through logic) to create God in our own image.

Science: physically (genetics), emotionally (psychology), socially (sociology) — you get the point.

The reason that people are not too familiar with what magic really is, is partly because it gets stuck with the leftovers that science does not yet have a solution for: the soul, ego engineering, telepathy, empathy, telekinesis, teleportation. Although with magic doing these things is inefficient, unpredictable, and often dangerous– it still remains useful because it is only through more primitive magic that these things can be done.

In its purest form, an Archona is an artificially created (man-made) soul that can serve a variety of purposes, although it most cases it is not consciously made (although it can be consciously observed after its creation). Currently there is no scientific way of creating an Archona (although I hope to change that which my up-and-coming field of Ego Engineering); Archona are currently only developed using magic, and are usually created “accidentally’, in response to, among many other things, post-traumatic stress.

I myself am just beginning to learn about Archona, as they are something I only recently became aware of. But it is already abundantly that they are a significant part of our lives, and are only bound to become more important in the future.