Who are the Archons - The Rulers of the Cosmos in Gnosticism & their Origins in Cosmology and Magic

perhaps one of the most scandalous tenets of some schools of ancient Christianity is that the cosmos around us is inherently evil forged by a psychopathic demiurg and ruled over by a host of planetary demons bent on nothing less than the torture and enslavement of the Divine spark hidden within each human being the origin and nature of those rulers or archons in ancient Greek remains one of the more obscure issues in this quite honestly provocative theology but the discovery of a wealth of ancient magical texts and a small library from Egypt has shed more light on the very beings these Christians felt must be finally defeated and surpassed as the soul escaped our Cosmic prison in this episode I want to explore what we know about the archons their origins in Greco Egyptian cosmology and magic and how ancient Christians though now known of often as gnostics so problematically thought they could soar beyond the terrible clutches of these beings if you're interested in Magic hermetic philosophy gnosticism Alchemy cabala or the history of the occult make sure to subscribe here to esoterica and also check out my numerous other content and topics on esotericism including curated playlist on a range of topics also if you want to support the work this work of providing accessible scholarly and free content on topics and as terrorism here on YouTube you know for free i' hope you consider supporting my work on patreon you can use a onetime donation you can also take advantage of the super thanks option just below the video or you can pick up some of our black metal merch over on the store tab for the channel but now let's explore the wardens the prison guards of our Cosmic cell our Cosmic prison the archons of ancient gnosticism I'm Justin Sledge and welcome to esoterica where we explore the Arcane in history philosophy and [Music] [Music] religion the world of the 2 and especially the 3 centuries of the Common Era was a world increasingly coming apart a World tearing itself apart at the seams especially from within the traditional perspective of ancient Egypt it was something of an apocalypse it was really the end of the world of ancient Egypt centuries of helenistic Hemy Roman Conquest along with widespread economic and political stability made for a world very much worth is escaping and a great many schools of theological spiritual and philosophical escapism frankly emerged the inward turn of stoicism as a coping philosophy the mystical Ascent spiritualities of Jewish Mera and hermetic philosophies and the afterlife oriented anti-world Redemption offered by the christianities christianities of that day made for a veritable menu of Technologies for just that Cosmic Escape perhaps none was more radical none more extreme than the early species of Christianity that have come down to be known as gnosticism now to be frank I just don't have time to do a deep dive into the incredibly complex mythologies of the sethians and the valentinians and the aites and the badenian or the canites though I've done episodes on many of those and they were probably worth watching especially the episode on the apocryphon of John and the section on the valentinian Christianity those are going to be really important connective tissues to get an idea of what's going on in this video in fact I have a whole gnosticism playlist you can check out if you're interested in really going deep on the Gnostic train but the the central thrust share by many of these theologies is that the true reality is a spiritual reality not this it's a spiritual reality presided over by an ineffable deity whose outflowing whose emanations generated a host of beings known as the fullness or the ploma in Greek however one such entity Sophia or wisdom sought to create on her own without the consent of the great invisible spirit this mistake created a horrifying being a nightmarish creature known variously as saklas samel yal or the demiurge now unlike platonism stoicism Judaism or other species of Christianity For Whom the creator of this world was a benevolent deity who created a maximally beautiful world a maximally good World these Christians held that the physical Cosmos was a kind of that this was all a kind of prison ruled over by That Hideous Demi urge the crafts person along with a retinue of malevolent beings known as the rulers or archons in ancient Greek in this myth the upper spiritual realm ultimately takes pity on us he poor human beings and smuggles within them a Divine spiritual spark and ultimately sends Christ Jesus who reveals the truth about our Cosmos and the means by which to escape it and of course to return with him finally to that Divine Light Of course I'm greatly simplifying the mythology there is an enormous amount of variation both in these schools of thought and between them frankly there's not just one gnosticism but in a structure Cal sense the core myth system remains remarkably consistent there's an an effable spiritual reality in which a metaphysical tragedy occurs engendering the creation of the malevolent demiurge which in turn creates the physical reality around us the physical Cosmos in which Divine elements are trapped or encased within human beings and we as human beings have to escape this world in this episode however I want to focus in on one element just one element of this mythology the origins and nature of the cosmic prism wardens as it were the archons now of course I'll be coming back to do another episode on the origins of really the most shocking element in all of this the origins and nature of the evil Creator or the diur sakas S yal but the archons turn out to be a crucially important element in this mythology because in a very important sense they have created this phys physical prison including our bodies in which we are trapped and deluded into believing this is all real they are responsible for tricking us into believing that any of this is real and even our thoughts and emotions are just inner puppetry to control us and that these entities must be ultimately defeated and bypassed in our final jailbreak back to the spiritual world of light Beauty and Oneness so what do we really know about the archons the term archon would have struck ancient ear as powerfully political though without much of the Majesty or any association with royalty I think that's important thus a Latin equivalent might be magistrate or Governor they're basically political functionaries who have rule locally but not totally if you ever if you've ever worked in retail they're like the they like the assistant manager with a chip on the shoulder who get off on making your life miserable because they got picked on when they were little they need therapy not managerial positions most of what we know about the archons can be found spread through the literature written by the so-called Gnostic Christians themselves and the pmics against some written by other Christians such as irenaeus hiotis and epiphanius now as I've mentioned earlier in most of these mythological systems these are beings created or somehow generated by the malevolent de urge both for its own narcissistic needs but also to act as secondary creators and enforcers of this physical prison Cosmos thus in an important sense they are the beings most intimately responsible for this whole mess and also they are the first major hurdle that one faces in one's Escape back to the realm of spiritual fullness so I hope you could understand that knowing a bit about them seems gerine to making just that Escape many if not most of the Gnostic creation myths contain some mention of the archons though the details on them vary greatly from text to text perhaps the most instructive and popular narrative is represented by the apocryphon of John or the secret teachings of John following the ignorant and mistaken creation of yal the Demi urge with the Hideous body of a snake in the head of a lion its eyes flashing as if bolts of lightning that being yal de mates with itself it mates with the mindlessness within itself to produce a series of 12 fiery beings the names of many of these beings have their origins in Jewish mythology While others are frankly more mysterious very strange I'll come back to those in just a minute toward the end of the episode the first series of 12 archons probably represents the creation of the zodiac and thus the fixed Dome of the the Stars the fixed Dome of the cosmic system this is sort of the background of everything now from among these and separately are extracted again the text is confused here and it's probably two separate Traditions that have been fused together in the apocryphon of John but from these it seems that 12 independent kings are anointed or appointed over the Spheres of the heavens these seven rulers are thus associated with the visible planets or the wandering stars of the geocentric World these being represent not only the spatial Dimensions above us but also the course of time itself corresponding as the text says to the days of the week we even learn a bit about their physical appearance each having the face of various animals such as a sheep a donkey a hyena even one of flaming fire this is a feature that probably has its origins in traditional Egyptian religious iconography it's typically the idea of human being like creatures having the heads of animals and religious depictions of gods the murge having created these rulers then transferred some of his fire to them perhaps activating them or emanating them at some level such that they would believe he's well he's the only God and in his equally ignorant and narcissistic declaration I am God there is no God aside from me taken from the Genesis creation story there's immediately issued a declaration which is basically a rebuttal by a voice from the upper superal spiritual realm in fact alal goes so far as to model his inverse Realm of Darkness and matter our world on the superal realm though often with satanic inversions mirroring the upper worlds and from these the archons would emerge 365 Angels though it would be better to think of them as demons for well for obvious reasons once the physical world or our Cosmic prison was constructed the demier decided again in an act of extreme narcissism to create a being in his own image however it apparently required the aid of the archon demons and thus y de declared let us let us make human beings in our image this is by the way the hermeneutical answer given by the gnostics to that statement in Genesis that's in the plural the grammatical plural rather than the Divine singular which is anomalous it's not the monarchic plural it's literally a bunch of demons making human beings the apocryphon of John infamously identifying the creator of the biblical Genesis story with the evil demiurge but yal the archons are demons and they all set forth to create the primordial human being each forging a specific anatomical feature first the psychical features the psychical elements of the body and then the physical elements of the primordial human body the Adam again many of these names of the beings that construct our physical bodies and our psychical bodies are very obscure and I'll come back to them in just a moment following the creation of the 365 elements of the psychical body remember there's 365 of these archons of some level including this would include psychical states such as desires emotions fear grief the love of pleasure Etc well the heavenly mother at that point took pity on the primordial Adam and breathed through y life into to this psychical body of course due to the ignorance of the archons which are as malevolent as they are stupid frankly they didn't realize that by working together that they would create a psychical Adam that would be more powerful than all of them individually the psychical Adam was constructed by all of them therefore had all their powers with our powers combined they just created a being that could best all of them further enlightened Insight was cast down was put down into from from the spiritual realm into the psychical body giving human beings the ability to recognize at least the truth of their condition something that the archons certainly couldn't do well maybe with one exception but realizing their mistake the archons mixed together earth air Fire and Water they mixed together hulle matter and cast this psychical body into a prison of matter this is our physical bodies and then put that physical body in a garden of delights a garden of pleasure the Garden of Eden meant to intoxicate the Adam therefore basically intoxicating him with pleasure such that he would never realize the his condition nor realize his power and therefore never realize that he could in fact Escape but all of this is crucially important for considering our condition for these Christians not only is our physical body a prison a point well made in dualistic theories like this but ultimately even our psychical body is a prison what we think of as our mental and emotional life are all created by the archons for precisely keeping us imprisoned Shackled within delusions and emotions thus not only is our physical body a prison but also the negative thoughts and emotions which blind us to things like rage and fear and jealousy and love of pleasure in a sense because we are created by the archons our psychical and physical bodies are created by the archons they've left a a hideous imprint of themselves in our psyches and in this sense we're created like people possessed as our natural condition we're like marionettes controlled by the archons it's only through our enlightened Insight which came to us from the spiritual realm and the dedicated dedication of us to our spiritual life which Adam only recognized by the way in the creation of Eve or kava life that we have the ability and the means to transcend our otherwise condition of being a demonic puppet in fact the apocryphon of John rejects the concept of Eve being merely a derivative of Adam the text in fact notes that it was not from a rib as Moses says but Eve was actually made from the very image of enlightened Insight that was found within Adam regardless the primary role of the archons in this element of the mythology is to explain how our physical and I think even more importantly our psychical bodies having their orig and the contorted horrors of the archons the demons set the primary condition for our entrapment in this prison Cosmos now the elaborate mythologies of these texts are at face value they're pretty wild I mean irus just thought he could convince you that they're not true by just telling you what the gnostics believe and further they're very much Beyond The Pale of virtually any such narrative about the human condition and Antiquity I mean everyone admitted the world wasn't perfect sure but that this was all literally created by demons as a prison it was a bit much frankly and adherence of the spirituality clearly felt the need to defend this idea both by appealing to widely accepted Christian scriptures and by greatly clarifying the nature of these various myths I mean could just add more detail to make it even stranger and somehow that made it more believable and that's precisely what we find in an important text found in the fourth tractate of the second nagamati codex a text variously known as the hypothesis of the archons or the reality of the rulers or the nature of their arons there's a lot of ways of translating this depending on how you want to deal with the technical term hoasis in Greek it's well it's technical in this text the author seems to be welding together two previous documents in order to show that the archons are one very much real and two they must be vanquished and he does this by introducing the text with a paraphrase of the very famous quotation from Colossians 1:3 allegedly written by Paul that the followers of Christ do not struggle against the flesh but against the authorities the archons of the world and the spirits of wickedness in fact other Pauline or School of Paul text even hint that these beings live in the sky Ephesians 3:10 and 612 and over at Colossians 2:8 and 220 it even refers to them as Elemental spirits of the Universe thus linking them at some level perhaps with this vile materiality at least in the minds of the gnostics thus the text is meant to outline the reality and nature of the archons in this text the reality of the rulers we learn that the archons are androgine in fact yal de is also androgine and they have the faces of the beasts as we noted earlier and that they literally huffed and puffed in a failed attempt to raise the primordial adamic body to life all to no avail they they they couldn't bring him to life only when the superal breath flowed into him could he be animated again you you get the sense that the arons are they're pretty stupid but not only stupid they're hideously rapacious in this text like others the arons immediately attempt to pounce on Eve to assault her once they've created her however again their stupidity is their downfall she outwits them and she turns herself into a tree perhaps an echo of the Daphne Legend in Greek mythology but the archons being horrible go on to assault the mere shadow that she had left behind again their vess only being matched by their idiocy indeed the rapacious fervor of the archons would emerge again and again when they attempted to assault noria the daughter of Adam and Eve a crucially important character in these myth systems in fact noria she get her own episode she's really really important her whole book's dedicated to noria the Demonic archons threaten noria demanding that she submit to them sexually as Eve had done at least as they claim Eve had done however noria actually knew the truth that Eve hadn't submitted to them she knew that she tricked them and having special Insight she cried out to the upper spiritual Realms and taking pity on her the Angelic being elth descends driving away the archons and the rest of the text takes the form of a kind of something like an early Gnostic catechism in fact some scholars believe it was a literal read out loud catechistic text with noria interrogating elith about the true nature of reality and much of the details repeated there are actually found in other seian text especially texts like the apocryphon of John though there is a really important relatively novel account concerning one archon Sab remember when I said that ya declared that it was the only God only to be chided from a voice from above that chiding was actually done by the Angelic power of Life Zoe the daughter of Faith wisdom or Pista Sophia who has her own very complicated book well in this text the Aron Sab actually sees this moment he's high enough up in the aminations that he sees Zoe rebuke so Y and Zoe's breath becomes a fire in the face of Y and she casts it down into the bottom of the abyss and torus the archon Sabal realizes Y is liar he rejects the Divinity of Y the and rather he sends his prayers to the soal realm and in reward for that is actually elevated to the highest station he can be in this Cosmic prison he gets to go up to the eighth Heaven nearest to the Divine fullness or ploma and he creates for himself the Ezekiel style Chariot Throne we typically associate with Yahweh thus the quad beneficent archon Sabal is ultimately flanked By Zoe or the saal life and is given control over an angel of Wrath and then given rulership over this entire Cosmic realm thus lessening at least to some degree the more extreme dualism associated with this mythology as for yabal of course he rages in Envy Sabal is given all this power and that Envy gives birth to death and that death pollutes our entire Cosmic realm new nous other versions of this archontic mythology exist in various forms of ancient Christian literature one of the more fascinating is a partially preserved by origin in his pmic against celsus here we find details from a sect typically referred to as the aites from the word snake who apparently admired the wisdom beathing snake of the Garden of Eden who the archons sought to destroy in their mythology the snake really revealed to us all the wisdom and the archons tried to get rid of him and what has come down to us as the fight diagram we have what seems to have been a kind of esoteric geometric well representation or diagram of reality from the superal Realms all the way down to the infernal Realms with a series of seven archons which may have been generations of yal deau sort of yal emanating itself though again the text isn't clear in fact there are two different layers of the text and and it's preserved by origin but interestingly enough here the archons actually include classic archangels again with beastly head though one of them is clearly a corrupt version of the Hebrew tohuu the primordial chaos out of which creation is drawn there in the first creation story interestingly also the entire system is actually bounded at two levels by Leviathan and Behemoth as something like world souls for the psychical and material Realms respectively so so here Leviathan and Behemoth play a role though exactly what that role is isn't clear truth be told the exact nature of the ofite diagram is debated there are lots of different representations and this is probably just a good idea to say this will be a future episode Another very important text is the incredibly learned brilliant text on the origin of the world found just after reality of the rulers in the nagamani library and it also contains a list of archons which the text refers to as the seven powers of the heavens of chaos B name alert at any rate three of these Yao and aloi and aaos are actually denoted as directly sons of yal also good band name this wonderful text one of my favorites actually from the nagam library to tells how the other archons actually went to war against the righteous archon sa and in Triumph he would go on to create the seraphim the angels that rotate around the throne saying holy holy holy to celebrate soow and eventually he's responsible for creating Jesus sa in this myth creat Jesus Christ himself thus at least in this myth cycle the rebel archon sa who creates Jesus he's empowered from above and would eventually be sent into our realm to teach the path of redemption thus in a very important sense it's actually an archon a redeemed archon but an archon that ultimately provides the path to Salvation via the teachings of Christ in fact salvation it isn't clear Sabo himself even has access to he might not be able to escape this realm somehow making him all the more noble so B really is the MVP of this system and even though it's not directly related to this whole archon business if you're a fan of Thunder perfect mind and if you're not a fan of Thunder perfect mind you should just unsubscribe and go somewhere else you absolutely have to read on the origin of the world there's a surprise in there related to thunder I won't ruin what it is but it's there's an Easter egg a thunder perfect mind Easter egg and on the origins of the world other texts like the mammoth Pista Sophia seem to have only five archons but they do include hecy and Typhon interestingly enough and later pical texts also detail various archons as they occur in different kinds of sect of gnosticism the most comprehensive of those can be found in texts like the panarion of EP fanus of Salamis which is a positively fascinating collection of anti-h heresy texts in fact the panarion even details a rather late surviving sect in the 4th Century that he denotes for their belief precisely for their belief in the archons he refers to them as the artics it may have been the case that the belief in the archons has simply become scarce by the 4th Century though it seems that the text notes that it was taught by a certain man named Peter near what is now modern day KRON but we have there an interesting story where this monk-like Gnostic character Peter converts a traveling Armenian Christian named utos epiphanius makes F of his name constantly but OS goes on to respread belief in the archons through the region of Armenia and Palestine perhaps making for a Renaissance in this belief before its basic final disappearance from history with the exception of the BAM Mills the cathars and the mandans this curious section of the text allegedly provides and again you should trust epiphanius as far as you can see him in fact some of the scriptures that the artics use we have a text called the greater and lesser Harmony theogenes which might actually survive in the nagamati library and also they seem to have employed the Ascension of Isaiah pretty popular text in early Christianity and one that over time will become later associated with the bogam mils and eventually the cathars if you're interested in the cathars I have several episodes about them and whether or not they really existed some of their teachings on the nature of the archons especially interesting and that they argued that the eighth highest heaven was again headed by Sab something we've seen on the origin of the war world and that they had a lower s tier at Heaven just below that though in their system Satan is actually created by sabat who is in turn giving rulership over this world the physical world Satan dominates it for now again this is an interesting inversion of the begetting relationships of these Gnostic mythologies and the other mythology yal deau generates sabau who supplants him here for the artics it's the other way around the artics also rejected sacraments including baptism because they were all formed in the name of the false god Sabal even though he's the highest one of this realm he's still fake further by rejecting the sacraments and the laws of this world their souls began to make the ascent it's by rejecting the sacraments of the Catholic Church they start their Ascent up making defensive speeches before each archon before finally arriving back at the mother of the ploma this is perhaps Sophia wisdom you get back to be with Sophia of course there's a great deal more of interest in this sect and you can read about it in the panarion whose name by the way panarion means Bread Basket so this text always gave me like Olive Garden Vibes regardless this is just a must read text for anyone interested in gnosticism even if you're sympathetic gnosticism you can often read these heresiological Literature Like uraeus or hiotis and you get so much wonderful information that it's very much worth reading in fact I've done a very long episode on urenus one of the earliest sort of anti-os heresiology and you may want to check it out it's of my favorite episodes I've made about gnosticism on the channel now any reader of these texts especially pistus Sophia and the apocon of John will face a significant degree of bewilderment at some of the names of the archons are their attending Angels demons so the natural question is just the origins of both the system of archons and why do they have these bizarre names why are they named this the origin question while not ever going to be definitively answered is probably likely maybe that it was common in the ancient world to attach Angels demons and diamons to the various Celestial regions and Antiquity and the Very celestial objects in Antiquity in fact this would continue well into the Middle Ages with angels basically moving planets around as their efficient causation and even with magical texts like the arbitel with its very system of invocation of planetary Spirits thus the 12-fold division followed by a Sevenfold division followed then by a 365 fold division which is found again in the apocryphon of John well it just nicely captures the circular Dome of the zodiac as the outermost sphere of the geocentric Cosmos in which the Moon and the Sun and the five classical wandering Stars the planets move about followed by 365 days of the solar year thus in so far as the archons are at the origin and control the fate of the material and psychical Cosmos including our physical and psychical bodies they would go from the fixed Stars at the very limit to the very Outer Edge to the wandering Stars down to the days of the year this all gives them power over both the physical Cosmos of space but also the processual cosmos of time it's basically the demonization of the attending beings at work in the cosmos of antiquity if you take those and just make them all evil well they go from being angels and diamons to to be in archons now the more difficult issue is the often bewildering name Nam given to these beings now many of them are clearly derived from Hebrew Aramaic Divine names which are then transposed and corrupted into Greek and CTIC these are sometimes traditional Angelic names which simply undergo demonization a great many of the others frankly are perplexing in origin this is especially true for names like yal de although there's some guessing that this is maybe Aramaic or Hebrew for the child of chaos or the begetter of chaos the maternal Spirit barbello which again has a kind of Aramaic feel to it and the host of archons and Angel demons found especially in the names of the beings responsible for the construction of the primordial adical body in the apocryphon of John or the profusion of entities that populate the treasuries of the books of you and the pis Sophia among a great many other Gnostic texts but the situation here isn't totally hopeless we're not totally hopeless in terms of finding out where these names may have come from interestingly enough some of these obscure names are actually found not just in Gnostic literature but they're also found in the great Arcane collection known to us as the Greek magical papi in a really fascinating article the classicus Howard Jackson locates numerous instances in which many of these archontic names are also found in a wide range of magical uses such as incantations nomina Barbara which is very important here and sigil likee uses in the Greek magical papy I agree I think with his assessment that either the two bodies of literature of Gnostic and magical share a common ancestor that is to say perhaps they go back to something like the indigenous Egyptian ritual technology and there's clearly definitely Egyptian words in some of this and I think one that's slightly more likely is that the Gnostic texts are actually lifting many of these archontic names from the magical literature in the Egyptian context in which these texts the Gnostic texts are being composed thus we might very well have a kind of magic tastic pipe l in the ancient world and that even might give us a glimpse into the milu of the authors that generated these Gnostic texts in fact this is all more all the more reinforced given the definite similarities between the rare instances of Gnostic ritual life especially something like the complex baptism rituals to be found in texts like the books of you which I've made a whole episode about those and The Wider range of Greco Egyptian magic there's just no way that those baptism rituals which are found in books like the Gnostic book of you and the Magical Technologies found in the Greek magical pyy are just not related simply not happening so what I suspect occurred and again we'll never know was a theological shift very much like the one described quite wonderfully actually in M David lwz in his book The Evil Creator which you absolutely should read in which the Israelite God is somehow demonized and then a two-step process by which the angels diamons respons for the movements and processes of the cosmos in the judeo helenistic worldview of the time were themselves in turn demonized in sets of 12 7 and 365 though again the texts aren't terribly systematic nor uniform frankly though I do think that a set of seven archons seems to have been the standard among this literature and finally these archontic beings they receive their names largely derived from Jewish and Greco Egyptian sources often traditional Jewish scriptures but also especially the complex world of Greco Egyptian magic of course this Theory does not by any means eliminate all the mysteries of the origins and nature of the archons in fact this would be an excellent application of something like AI along with a database of ancient Spirits Dions archon nomina Barbara Etc as envisioned by Dr Christen Swit who I really hope gets the funding to make just that database you can find out more about her in the description by the way if you're interested in ancient magic you absolutely have to check out her Channel Dr spitza it's one of the best resources out there on just that topic at any rate while the evil Demi urge ya the often well frankly steals the show perhaps because of our love for anything with a flare for the love crafty and I hope I've shown that the archons the archons also Pro play a decisively important role even a surprising role in this wonderfully weird mythology I mean you hardly ever hear about the Renegade archon responsible for creating Jesus or the connections of the archons with Greco Egyptian magic more generally in these ways among many many others their role is often downplayed it's often overshadowed because we love talking about the evil demiurge and I think that's the mistake if you want to really robustly understand these mythologies as usual I've included a collection of resources if you want to really dive into gnosticism in the description again also check out my playlist on gnosticism to really go through a bunch of these texts but until next time keep resisting those archontic psychical impulses and Ascend into the aernal Realms of course also thanks for watching esoterica where we explore the Arcane in history philosophy and religion

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Length: 37min 33sec (2253 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 20 2023