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by John Lash December 2004 Andalucia from MetaHistory Website
The stranger it gets, the more sense it makes. And the more sense it makes, the more imagination it takes to stay on board with the Gnostic experience.
That is the high challenge of the path of applied visionary science, the noetics of hyperception.
(Bear with me, folks: hyperception is my proposed term
for heightened faculties of awareness as demonstrated in the
siddhis
of Asian yogis and lamas, and the visionary prowess of shamans
around the world. Not to mention the natural faculties of children
and animals. Empathic communion with Gaia spontaneously incites
hyperception, directed perception in "altered states.")
To be a
heretic means to have choices, to opt for another way of believing,
another kind of knowing, another channel of perceiving, another
course of experience. Heresy is about having options, and
With the episode of Sabaoth's
conversion, we are introduced to a deal-breaker, perhaps the most
outrageous notion in occult and Gnostical lore: the pre-existence of
the human species in the cosmic order.
Atu denotes the product of divine emanation, Aeonic intent. (In Sanskrit, Ati means "supreme," as in Atiyoga or Dzogchen, the ninth and highest path of Buddhism.)
The made-up word Kadmon signifies
"encoded unit," comparable to our modern conception of the genome.
Atu Kadmon is the encoded monad for the human species.
Through a complex
process of collaboration, a singularity emerges from the Originator,
the Uncreated Source, and then is meticulously channeled into a
standing wave that is projected through a circular lattice to
produce a fractal deposit in the outer limbs of the galaxy. (The
Gaia Mythos, Episodes 4 through 7.)
We saw in the episode of Sabaoth's conversion how the Aeon Sophia shames Yaldabaoth and warns him of his end. Doing so, She invokes a vision, She calls the cosmic witnesses to see what She sees.
This is one of the sublime, arresting moments of Gnostic cosmology.
The Aeon Sophia has been stunned by Her plunge into the outer regions of the galaxy, but gradually She comes around. In one decisive moment She is able to rally Her powers and regain the vision of what She, in union with Her consort, the Aeon Christos, had originally projected from the Pleromic core.
As described in Episode 9 of The Gaia Mythos, "Before Orion's Mist":
What Sophia sees gives Her strength to challenge Yaldabaoth, the Lord Archon, by invoking the vision of humanity to come.
This key moment of the Fallen Goddess scenario is repeated half a dozen times in various codices, but most vividly in The Apocryphon of John.
Without going into an elaborate commentary, a couple of key points in this narrative, involving tricky translation issues, need to be clarified. Revisionist scholars like Marvin Meyer insist on translating the Coptic word rhome as "human" rather than "man."
So, Sophia's pronouncement,
Karen King, in her translation of the Gospel of Mary (found in the Berlin Codex along with a draft of The Apocryphon of John) opts for the clean generic language without gender bias.
Of course, King does not extrapolate the
Gnostic material in astronomical terms, as I do. No scholar in
his/her right
mind would propose, or even imply, that "the Image of the Divine
Realm" is a biological field in the external cosmos, as well as a
subjective component of the human psyche.)
Years ago I proposed the Devanthropos, "radiant Humanity" for the pre-existent template. Coptic is extremely poor in metaphysical and poetic expression, and it lends itself very awkwardly to ideas and images that require elaborate syntax. Moreover, one in every five Coptic words in the codices is a loan from Greek. Translating the Coptic texts is like using a range of poetic hues to fill in the crude underpainting of the Greek originals.
Problems occur because
the Greek "originals," no better than garbled and incoherent notes
in the first place, have been translated by scribes who did not
understand them very well, if at all.
Unfortunately, the Coptic copyist of The Apocryphon of John carries over the Greek word andreos, "male," giving a masculine bias to the cosmic matrix of humanity. Elsewhere in The Apocryphon of John and the other cosmological treatises, anthropos is used to indicate generic humanity without sexual bias.
The Coptic equivalent is rhome, "human." (Pronounced RO-may.)
In On the Origin of the World the Anthropos template is called "Adam of Light" and "holy Adamas."
(108: 20-25) This conception was absorbed into Kabala where it comes
to be seen in Adam Kadmon, the "Primal Man" (pictured above).
The illustration above shows a typical version of Primal Humanity represented as a male figure embellished with cosmic iconography and occult symbols.
In The Hero, I pointed out that,
There is a
long-standing tradition involved here, of course - not to mention deep
"archetypal" formative tendencies in the human psyche. Nevertheless,
the moment for a huge psychic shift may be at hand...
Yaldabaoth, the Chief Archon or Protarchon, is the putative master of the Heptad. He is most definitely a male creator god, the prototype of Jehovah, and the Father God of Christianity, and Allah.
Monotheism is the fixation of Yaldabaoth on his illusional ego, and this illusion infects all those who adopt him as the supreme being. The theology of the One God carries and enforces a heavy patriarchal agenda. The Gnostic image of the Metropator, the Cosmic Parents, succeeds in avoiding either a masculine or feminine bias for the Divine.
This language vividly
recalls the Yab-Yum of Tibetan Buddhism, and the Shiva-Shakti
coupling of Hindu Tantra.
So an apt rendering would be,
The strain of humanity to which we belong is one outgrowth of the "master" template - Let's watch the language, boys! - deposited in the Orion Nebula.
The Devanthropos is a massive locus of singularity that engenders human strains in earthlike settings throughout the galaxy from whose central bulge that singularity emerged.
This broadband emanation of organic life is unique to "our" galaxy, but our version of it is not unique within this galaxy.
Narrative Link
The Gaia Mythos is insuperable because it contains the sole description of alien life inherent to the human condition, and cosmologically situated.
As M.C. Hammer said, speaking from the depths of his pantaloons,
The Gnostic catechism clearly says,
When we realize who the Archons are, we can finally understand who we are.
The secret of human potential, our Sophianic endowment, becomes self-evident when we realize what threatens it, and how. This is truly strange, and yet it makes perfect sense. We discover our humanity at the very moment when we are most at risk of losing it, and that moment is upon us. As long as we do not reach this realization, the revelation of our own identity as a pre-existent species, we will never see through the illusion of our isolation on this lonely planet, Earth.
This is the great imaginative leap for
humanity today.
Why, then, do we suffer
the illusion of cosmic quarantine?
Called anomia, "aberration," in
The Apocryphon of John and elsewhere, the dementia of the Archons is
evident in our own minds, especially in religious ideas such as the
belief that we, the human species, are supreme and unique, created
"in God's image."
Rather, humanity is the open-ended evolution of an encoded monad with infinite potential to develop in novel ways. To do so, the species requires a special environment that reflects its deepest potential as well as its dependence on exchange with other species.
This is exactly what
the miraculous biosphere, the Gaian life-matrix, does for us.
We cannot
continue in Gaia's way unless we enter Her story and live in the
description it provides. Our salvation in Gnostic terms is a
narrative link to the living planet, not supernatural intervention
from outside it - which is the Archontic ploy.
Artificial intelligence for genuine living knowledge. Cyberspace for garden-space. Parking lots for glaciers. In an insidious secondary tactic, upon which they rely heavily, they make simulation do double duty as a blind as well as a substitute.
Example:
Naturally, we become extremely leery of totalitarian models, "master narratives," etc.
This wariness, although perfectly
genuine and a sign of sanity, serves to blind us to the nature of
the "mistress narrative" we can develop with Gaia-Sophia.
Well, yes and no. The Mythos is not totalitarian, but it takes an exceptional degree of acumen to see how it is not so. In reality, the Mythos is generic to our species, thus uniform in narrative terms.
The lovely challenge with this species-specific story is not just to get it in your own way, but to get out of your own way and engage something that transcends you.
This is why the Gaia Mythos must be transceived and shaped narratively, mythopoetically, through shamanic recall that requires ego-death. We all come to the Her story in our own way, but we do not develop it in our own way.
We develop it by going beyond ourselves. By entering Her Way. Thus, the Mythos has a quasi-totalitarian look because it is uniform in terms of the revelation that sources it.
It is not a carte
blanche for personal expression, it is a calling to transpersonal
expression.
Gnostic teachings are unique in providing extensive background on the birth of the Sun, the formation of the Earth, and its capture in the planetary system.
This narrative places the Archons in a cosmic setting, along
with humanity - the pre-existent, preterrestrial mold of humanity,
that is. Atu Kadmon is our cosmic origin as a species. Like the
Archons, we are, extraterrestrials - but in our own way.
The process of "deification" was wrongly attributed to the Mysteries by Gnostic wannabes like Clement of Alexandria.
Genuine Gnostics do not pretend to be Gods on earth, deities in human guise. They aspire to know as the Gods know, and what the Gods know, but not literally or even symbolically to become Gods.
Cognitive ecstasy brings moments
of mystical identity with the Godhead, of course, but it also
insures and enhances the supreme discrimination between human and
divine.
It does not merely state that we are not alone: it explains WHY we are not alone. Why we cannot afford to believe we are alone, or in any way supreme and unique.
Gnostics constantly warned that the Archons envy
us our humanity. To cope with the unbearable anguish of their envy,
our alien cousins attempt to infect us with their mentality so that
we become more like them and their anguish is lessened. By
insinuating in our minds the belief that we are made in God's image,
they draw us into a mental game we cannot win because its rules are
false, arbitrary, alien to human experience.
The precise received text in mythological idiom reads like this:
Gnostic cosmology is amazing, if for nothing else but the imaginative subtlety of passages like this one.
This is applied noetics, profound psychologial teaching framed in mythological terms. The Archons believe they can create humanity in their image, and they wish humanity to believe the same!!
Lacking ennoia, the Archons cannot create, they can only imitate.
Beholding the Anthropos template, they wrongly imagine they can create humanity to resemble themselves, and this remains their most cherished desire: to have us become like them.
The only way they can achieve this aim
is to trick us into a betrayal of our basic humanity. Gnostics
taught that due to our exceptionally large margin for error, we are
a species that can stray from its proper course of evolution, and
thus betray its true potential. If this deviating tendency goes
unchecked and uncorrected, we can indeed fulfill the wish of the
Archons.
"Archons 'R Us" may be the most liberating message on the planet.
Only Gnosis, the god-like knowledge of our origins, can save us from
the self-abandonment we risk by ceding our minds to the
"Authorities."
But how can we rule over anything if we cannot even choose the beliefs that drive our behavior, the thoughts that rule our minds?
In the first three centuries of the Common Era, Gnostic teachers who emerged from the Mystery Schools taught that the paramount tool of alien intrusion is the salvationist program of religion, centered on the image of human divinity.
This is the core message of the Gnostic protest against Judeo-Christian doctrines. Those who were warned of this danger turned on the Gnostics and eradicated them. If the Gnostic protest had been heeded, Christianity as we know it could never have come to be.
Gnostic teachings had to be eliminated so
that the salvationist program could spread.
This trick substitutes for faith in the species, our confidence in our inner wisdom potential, the belief that we must be made human through a superhuman reflection, the Word made Flesh.
The arch-con is human divinity. If this idea had not infected our species' imagination, the world would look nothing like it does today. Human divinity is the confidence trick that allows us to perpetrate a multitude of sins, which are nothing but uncorrected errors, patterns of behavior alien to our inborn capacities.
From the belief in human divinity proceed all the great evils humankind is heir to. Like Christ, they all begin with c: conversion, conquest, colonization, consumption.
And most lately, cyberspace, where the Archons have migrated.
Finally, they have a secure niche
on the planet. As I write these words I stand before their Altar, as
you may be doing when you read them. But I do not worship there.
We are now closing a fourth phase that began when science took over the work of religion, around 1650.
The fifth phase
will be short but not, perhaps, sweet. We are facing terminal
conditions, including climatic collapse and cybernetic disembodiment
of the species.
Radical Pagan Gnosis was anti-Jewish and anti-Christian in opposing the salvationist ideologies common to those two belief-systems. If Gnostics survived today, they would oppose Islam, another viral mutation of the same ideology, on the same grounds.
Gnostics were not against love, tolerance, forgiveness, self-regulation, kindness, compassion, or any other genuine virtues attributed to Judaic and Christian morality, and latterly to Islam (what a disgusting sham!!).
They were against the ideological framework of salvation
with its three key components: the dominion of humanity on Earth,
the incarnation of divinity in human form, and final retribution by
the Father God. (More on this crucial point in the companion essay,
How We Are Deviated.)
But the will to create such a
world has to be forged in the realization of what we're up against.
To understand Archontic intrusion requires a complex and extensive background, a cosmological education up to the graduate level.
Yet this background,
...comprises that part of our own story we vitally need to learn before we can understand the role of the Archons in the full story.
It's a big order, I admit, but it may be the decisive insight we
need today, the crucial dose of "planet medicine" that can restore
human imagination to its divine potential.
You can learn a lot
from these models and systems, but you learn almost nothing about
Gaia. I have spent my life from the age of four in pursuit of esoterics... Talk about getting lost in a shaggy dog story. Or it is
a shaggy god story?
I
don't have the answer here, but at least the language of the
question is precise enough, for now. Why is the Gnostic narrative of
pre-existence so crucial for the shift ahead? Because the story
shows how Sophia Herself invokes the Devanthropos to put the Lord
Archon in his place. And we must do the same.
(Jacques Vallee, whom I regard as the most sophisticated analyst of the ET/UFO enigma, holds the view that the pesky aliens come from within our local system.)
They are a specific predatory species with special designs on humanity, not to be confused with other non-human entities, such as "Star People" and allies from other dimensions, supernatural guardians, the Dead, and other human strains of the Anthropos who live in planetary settings somewhat like ours - all of whom are benevolent or neutral.
This
picture is truly vast, but the Gnostic view is precise in the way it
specifies the predatory nature of the Archons.
We first have to define our role in the correction of the Aeon Sophia: this is nothing less than defining the purpose of humanity in Gaia's evolution. If we are engaged in a project, and someone is helping or impeding us, we cannot know how they are doing so unless we first understand what we ourselves are doing.
This is just common sense.
(Of course, there is a huge sci-fi appeal in the Gnostic Archon scenario. It could happen that the story spreads merely as a story, and that would be fine.)
How the recovered Gnostic cosmology might spread, and to whom, is a
continual concern of mine, so it might be appropriate to close with
some personal reflections on this issue.
It is intended for the generations to come, but it must be
transmitted by the generation of today, by an elect, self-selecting
portion of it.
This word derives from the common Sanskrit word shisha, "disciple, student." Shishta means something like "the student body." Or "learning party," to borrow an apt term. The main mark of the Shishta is egality in knowledge.
Everyone carries their share and
all who learn, also teach. I would say this is the primary
requirement for transmission of the Gaia Mythos and the Archon
scenario: those who learn it, teach it. At least that is what I
would propose as the primary mark of the Shishta. The leading
aspiration, if you will.
Techniques of cognitive ecstasy, including divination, dance and trance, are the best tools for spreading the Mythos in its ever-expanding narrative form. At the same time, there is a moral balance to observe.
Everything we learn about Anthropos and Archons
must be balanced between our shared self-knowledge as a species and
our solitary individual moments of communion with Gaia.
We know this intuitively,
and feel it deeply in a language older than words. (Thanks,
Derrick.) So it is that when the salmon swim off course, when whales
get beached, when geese migrating south end up in Swansea, we lurch,
we are deeply panged to see our animal kin so disoriented, so
dislodged from their beauteous fate fulfilled.
And in that way we can demean the Mystery.
The promise we
carry is exceptional, not because of our presumed privileged status,
and not because we are divinity in human guise - no one human ever
was, or ever needs to be - but because of our demeaning tendencies.
This is the lesson to be learned from our unwitting complicity with
our alien cousins.
There is our promise, perpetually fulfilled.
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sometimes
those options are rather outrageous.