Gnostic Insights Mapping the Gnostic Gospel 2015-2025
I have recently taken down my older “New Gnostic Gospel” blog in favor of focusing on GnosticInsights.com and the Gnostic Reformation on Substack. Before taking down the old blog I saved this one article that was first printed in June of 2015. I’m going to go through it with you today to see how this gnosis has held up over the past 10 years.
The obvious improvement is the quality of my illustrations. I thought it would be a treat for you to see how they have evolved. This was the original mapping of the new Gnostic Gospel. These concepts have been more colorfully illustrated, although the original mapping still holds up. You may find all of this in its most simple form in my book, The Gnostic Gospel Illuminated. For a more detailed explanation, pick up a copy of A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel at amazon.
Monday, June 15, 2015
These diagrams are my visual representations of the “Tripartite Tractate.” The Tripartite Tractate is one book of the collection known as the Nag Hammadi scriptures that were discovered buried in the Egyptian desert in 1945. The Nag Hammadi texts were buried sometime in the 3rd century by monks who sought to preserve and protect them from those who wanted to weed them out as heresies as they designed the official shape of the Christian religion.
After studying the Tripartite Tractate, I can see why the early Pope did not want this to make it into the Bible. For one thing, the Christ figure, the “Son of God,” is not all perfect and all powerful, as portrayed in the Christian Bible; matter of fact, Logos is directly implicated in the Fall. For another thing, salvation is a personal, mystical affair conferred directly by the Father through Logos, not something conferred by preaching or baptism. Thirdly, the cosmology presented here makes clear that those who, shall we say, struggle for righteousness against a sinful world are not necessarily doing God’s work, but are caught in an endless war against the “evil doers,” and have themselves fallen into some sort of earthly death trap.
Okay. Let’s quickly amend that first concept about the Son of God. The Christian religion has lumped three distinct characters together into one Son of God. In the Gnostic Gospel, these three are broken out by their sequential appearance in the rollout of the Gnostic cosmogeny.
1: The Son of God is indeed the all-perfect “only begotten Son” of the Father’s originating consciousness. Because of His perfection and proximity to the Father, the Son is the only entity that can link directly up with the Source without the risk of annihilation. The Son is the bucket dipped into the Sea, reflecting every characteristic of the originating Father. All subsequent entities, life, consciousness, laws and power come through the Son.
2: Logos is not the Son after all. My confusion arose from John 1:1-5 where it states, “in the beginning was the Logos [Word], and Logos was with God, and Logos was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through Him, and without Him nothing was made that was made. In Him was life, and the life was the light of men. And the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not comprehend it.” The church teaches this passage as describing the Son. Upon further reflection, the Aeon we call Logos fulfills the description in John 1, once we consider the earlier Gnostic cosmogeny—Logos, one of the Aeons of the Fullness—was with God prior to the Fall. After the Fall and the abandonment of the Demiurge, life, light, and consciousness was sent down into the otherwise dead material universe in the form of all of us 2nd Order Powers. We are the fruit of Logos.
3: The Christ is the 3rd Order of Powers, formed through the united prayer of the Fullness and the Son, with the approval of the Father. The Christ contains all of the power and majesty of the Son. The Christ presents Himself as the Redeemer of every 2nd Order Power to bring us back home to the ethereal plane after our sojourn here in the material cosmos.
Back to the 2015 article: As I said, the complete article is underway. Meanwhile, for those of you who want to get started, here it is in picture form.
Gnostic Cosmology according to the Tripartite Tractate, by Cyd Ropp, Ph.D. 2015
On the big poster above, start at the upper left corner and read clockwise. Our earthly situation is portrayed in the middle of the diagram. Salvation and the end of the world comes in the form of the pyramid at the lower left. Below are various sections of the diagram presented on their own. If you have already been studying Gnostic cosmology, these diagrams will clarify various terms and activities. If you haven’t already been studying this, then these diagrams will be super confusing so don’t worry about it. All will be revealed in good time.
In terms of A Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything, [which my readers in 2015 were all familiar with] this cosmology begins prior to “in the beginning…” and proceeds through the formation of Units of Consciousness and the appearance of our physical universe, and concludes with the final collapse of the universe. It also takes place during the life cycle of each and every Unit of Consciousness, as it is a Fractal Pattern that repeats itself over and over again. Those of you who have read A Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything will recognize the role of the hierarchical distribution and the role of toroidal flow in the final reorganization of creation. [updated edition of A Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything is available through amazon]
| The First Glory, The Son of the Father. First differentiation after the Undifferentiated Unity of the Metaversal Father. |
| The Second Glory. The Son has realized it is comprised of many traits of the Father. These traits are called “aeons” in Gnostic terminology. When they’re all grouped together they are called the Fullness, or the All. Many differentiations but total harmony. Once these traits are named, they fall out of undifferentiated harmony and rearrange themselves into the pyramidal hierarchy depicted below. |
| The Fruit of the Third Glory is the offspring of the All in a perfectly arranged hierarchy. This stage in creation is known as the First Order of Powers. Everyone and everything knows its place and is happy. The final Aeon to arrive at the top of the pyramid, known in the Tripartite Tractate as “Presumptuous Thought,” looks down at the hierarchy and sees them all arranged underneath him. This gives that Aeon the idea that he is in charge of the pyramid. He reaches upward to reinsert the pyramid into the Metaverse. This is done without authorization or position. This results in The Fall. |
Update: Now, that’s a surprise. I originally identified Logos as “presumptuous thought.” That thought is more specifically the Ego of Logos. The Self of Logos continues to reflect the entirety of the Fullness as a complete, fractal Pleroma. And it looks as though this diagram shows the entire Fullness Falling, but it is only the fractal Pleroma of Logos that Falls. The original Fullness is untouched by the Fall. They remain behind and pray for their fellow Aeon Logos to return safely.
| The Fall tumbles the pyramid of Aeons out of arrangement. They Fall into confusion, Chaos. They are dispersed and alone for the first time, cut off from each other and the All. This is now called the Deficiency, and t he Imitation. Logos panics and abandons the Imitation and retreats back to the All. God the Father also retreats in horror from the Deficiency, which throws up a Boundary containing the Imitation. Logos and the All try to rescue their abandoned children by praying for them and thus giving them the Remembrance of Who and What they used to be, before the Fall. |
Update: when Logos and the All pray for the rescue of the Deficiency, that is when the 2nd Orderof Powers is fruited down here below. We are those of the Remembrance.
| The prayers of Logos and the All results in the Second Order of Powers. There are now two types of creatures: those of the Deficiency who have no belief in who or what came before, and those of the Remembrance, who have come to themselves through “Repentance” and “Conversion” and recall their fellow Aeons and their place with the Father in the Fullness. Rather than rejoining Logos and the All, those of the Remembrance choose to do battle with those of the Imitation. They are locked in an endless righteous War where no one can win. |
Update: this part of the cosmogeny has taken a few years of discussion with my brother to mine our gnosis. Those of the imitation are not to be referred to as “creatures” because they were not created as 2nd Order Powers. Only the 2nd Order are living creatures. Those of the imitation are archons generated by the Demiurge. They are shadows. They are not living.
| Release from the Endless War comes by intervention of the Father and the Fullness working together. They produce the Living Image of the All and the Father–the Christ. The Christ places himself upon the Lost like a garment that restores perfection and fills the Lost with inexpressible Joy, giving them the Logos that enables them to detach and dispel delusion. This results in the Third Order of Powers–the Aeons of the Images–that now carry within themselves the Seed of the Word. |
| The final Order of Creation is called The Economy and The Consolidation. All three types of creatures are represented: those of the imitation, those of the remembrance, and those who have been redeemed by Christ. This drawing is a pyramidal shaped “core sample” of creation. The small figure at the lower right is a cutaway view of creation, with the center of the donut mapping to the top of the pyramid. |
Update: Those of the imitation are not Second Order Powers; they are archons of the Demiurge. At this point, when all Second Orders are redeemed through the Power of the Christ, only the imitations of the deficiency are left out of the new Economy. The New Economy consists of everything that existed from the beginning, prior to the material cosmos, plus us Second Order Powers. The Demiurge is also redeemed at this point and Logos is reunited with his wandering Ego. This brings the Fullness to completion.
Labels: aeons, Cyd Ropp, First Glory, Gnostic cosmology, Gnostic Gospels, Logos, Nag Hammadi, pleroma, Second Glory, The All, The Economy, Third Glory, Tripartite Tractate
How neat! The original article was posted at 1:11 PM—one of my favorite times of day! The Labels links are to vestigal articles posted over at the original Simple Explanation Blog.
Below is the Gnostic Gospel Cosmology map as it now appears in A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel:
The children’s Gnostic Gospel book is slowly but surely coming along. The illustrator has completed the first 10 pages, so we’re about 1/3 of the way through the book. Your contribution to this effort would help immensely. You can be a part of this newest book by submitting a contribution earmarked for the illustrator’s fee. Here’s what the Fall looks like:
p. 7 “But when Logos tried to bring the Father his gift, he fell all the way out of Heaven!”
p. 8 “Logos crashed into the darkness and broke apart. Now he was split in two!”
