"Do not tell lies, and do not do what you hate, for all things are plain in the sight of heaven.

For nothing hidden will not become manifest, and nothing covered will remain without being uncovered."

(Gospel of Thomas, Logion 6, Lambdin translation)

J2020

PHILO
CINE
SOPHIA

“Aesthetic theories, including philosophies of film, find their rigor and plausibility in the degree to which they illuminate our experience and understanding of singular works of art.” (Sinnerbrink, 18)

The First Repentance:

"O Light of lights, in whom I have had faith from the beginning,
hearken now then, O Light, unto my repentance.
Save me, O Light, for evil thoughts have entered into me.

I gazed, O Light, into the lower parts and saw there a light. thinking:
I will go to that region, in order that I may take that light.
And I went and found myself in the darkness which is in the chaos below, and I could no more speed thence and go to my region, for I was sore pressed by all the emanations of Self-willed, and the lion-faced power took away my light in me."

"My power looked forth from the midst of the chaos and from the midst of the darkness, and I waited for my pair, that he should come and fight for me, and he came not, and I looked that he should come and lend me power, and I found him not.

And when I sought the light, they gave me darkness; and when I sought my power, they gave me matter."

Glossary of terms, characters, and concepts

GNOSIS

belladonna-crossburned

Acquaintance with God
In contrast to Agnosis (ignorance of God)
Gnostics support their belief in divinity by claiming direct experience with it.

God, for the Gnostic, is a “replication of characters at different levels of reality" which "plays out the gnostic concept of emanation, the process by which the single ultimate principle of all being, the Invisible Spirit, unfolds into an Entirety that consists of multiple aeons and yet is simultaneously nothing more than the Invisible Spirit itself." (Brakke, 203) The Gnostic believes in the existence of God as a direct result of their own knowledge/understanding/experience.

"The gap between self and not-self may provide the space in which knowledge of self and other, gnosis, may take place.” (Brakke, 196)

“Moreover, some gnostic works invite their readers or hearers to add their voices or, better, to participate in the work’s pseudonymity by giving voice to speakers within the work.” (Brakke, 197)

KNOWLEDGE (Greek)

His Dark Materials - Title Sequence (dutch)

1. EPISTEME - derivative knowledge, knowledge by way of reason/measurement

2. GNOSIS - familiar knowledge, knowledge by way of personal experience

There are three Greek words for knowledge. In English, as in the academic study of philosophy, knowledge is generally attributed to epistemological pursuits (episteme).

This mirrors current conceptions of useful, functional, utility, technically-based knowledge (STEM) with almost any other possible form of knowledge. This would be characteristic of a rationalist position.

Practitioners of "hard" knowledge generally ally themselves with a static and unaffected observer, and simultanously depend on a sharp division, inherited in the Western philosophical tradition (wisdom) and by its creation (science), between subject/object, subjective/objective, and observer/observed.

Gnosis, on the other hand, requires not unaffected objectivity but rather deeply held personal experience that is accessible via a unifying principle between self and other.

GNOSTICISM

His Dark Materials - S01E01Scholastic Sanctuary is a tenuous ideological freedom offered by the authoritarian religious institution, the Magisterium, that rules the world of His Dark Materials. Illegitimate Lyra is raised, therefore, at Oxford.

Influences include Platonism/NeoPlatonism/Hellenistic thought, Jewish mystical tradition, Christian mysticism, and Hermetic philosophy.

Religious and philosophical movement, broad in scope, generally practiced between the beginnings of the Common Era and 400 CE. Born from a hybridization of many strains of thought present in the cosmopolitan "cradle of civilization" - Upper Egypt, Sumeria, Greece, Syria, throughout the Roman empire and beyond.

For centuries, heresiologists were the primary source material for what was known of the lost Gnostic religion. This changed beginning in the 1770's with the discovery of the Askew codex containing the Pistis Sophia, and later discoveries in Upper Egypt in the 1890's.

The trickled stream of primary Gnostic sources spilled like a broken dam with the discovery of 13 Gnostic codices (books) in Nag Hammadi, near Alexandria, Egypt, months after the bomb was first dropped in 1945.

SOPHIA
(our quarry)

The concept of Wisdom personified, frequently appearing in Gnostic literature.

Sophia is the 13th and final "emanation" of the divine

The divine, full and complete and totally unified, exists and does not exist. It is a concept well beyond mortal fathoms.

This concept, as a monad, is essentially androgynous.

In an effort to Know the Highest reality, she makes the mistake that causes the creation of the world by way of Ialdabaoth., seeking to Know without the consent of her syzygy (consort, balance, equal; masculine principle).

IALDABAOTH/YALDABAOTH

HDM_29_FuryTenacious

Characterized as the Demiurge; literally, builder. An ignorant, false, but nonetheless "real" GOD. In the literature, His form is lion-faced with the body of a serpent.

God of the Old Testament (Yahweh, Elohim, Jehovah, etc).

Creator of a flawed world, his narcissism derives from ignorance - of Sophia, the Aeons, the Pleroma/Heaven, etc.. His ego and its various manifestations are sourced by his insecurity. "Thou shalt have no other gods" assumes the possibility of the existence of something outside itself, possibly betraying a fear of his creation's potential to surpass him.

This concept made the Gnostics especially susceptible to ire from their critics.

SYZYGY

Balancing Aeons. Syzygys are generally archetypical powers that are formed by two halves of a complete concept uniting into an entire principle.

In some Gnostic circles, Y'Shua/Jesus of Nazareth/the God-son is the syzygy of Sophia. Gross, right? That's like...his grandmother.

But it doesn't quite work that way, since for the Gnostic and according to the words of the man here described, he ascended beyond the realm of the Archons and Aeons, beyond the creations of Ialdabaoth, and raised Sophia from her state of oppression.

This would be representative of the syzygy of Logos and Wisdom.

In Jungian depth psychology, the anima/animus is a kind of psychic syzygy in an individual (un)consciousness. "Jung described the animus as the unconscious masculine side of a woman, and the anima as the unconscious feminine side of a man, each transcending the personal psyche." Wikipedia

AEONS/ARCHONS/EMANATIONS

12 powers (plus Sophia, the thirteenth) that characterize the divisions created after the monadic principle first divided itself.

Possibly related to other 12-point iterations, specifically those relevant to measurements of time and space. 12 months, 12 signs in the Western zodiac, 12 attributed disciples of the Logos/Jesus, 12 inches in a foot...

SUSPENSION OF DISBELIEF

I entered in into the thirteenth æon and found Pistis Sophia
below the thirteenth æon all alone and no one of them with her.

And she sat in that region grieving and mourning, because she had not been admitted
into the thirteenth æon, her higher region.

And she was moreover grieving
because of the torments which Self-willed,
who is one of the three triple-powers, had inflicted on her.

But this,--when I shall come to speak with you respecting their expansion, I will tell you the mystery, how this befell her. (Chapter 29)

It all made sense. That was the frightening part. 

It was a frequent fantasy - or was it a fact? that scrawled its way through pages young and old yet remained entirely obscure. A consistent heartbeat instructed each movement, each disparate sequence. A call to wisdom. Those such valuables souls that bid two to become one, and for one to seek wisdom. Wisdom, which you will find if you search sincerely for it. Wisdom, which will find you astonishingly troubled when you find it. Wisdom, herself, astonishingly troubled. 

    Sophia’s character consists of the following: mother to God the Father. She who bore that original Ialdabaoth, demiurge, inferior to humanity but whose rules we labored to satisfy. Yahweh, the jealous one-and-only, sample of a man to all men, sample of a husband to all women. Elohim, all-powerful, all-knowing, in His benevolent quest to rape humanity of both innocence and dignity until He could arise victorious, leeching power from the powerless. God of the weak, reflecting His weakness. Unconscious of the pleroma, the pantheon above and below Him, He creates humans to glorify Himself, but the spark in their eyes from His Mother surpasses His light. He extinguishes it gladly in His creations. He is threatened by their superiority.

Lion-faced, with the body of a snake. Lion-faced, consumed by lust. The snake embodied his more contemplative side, his cunning, his relationship with knowledge of good and evil. In his full form he prowls with his eyes and bores his danger deeply into the soul of his participant by any means necessary, front and rear, every orifice. Conquering the flesh mightily, easily, he may need a meal to satisfy the Sovereign, eating you at the end of your usefulness. The eaten find incorporation with their God.

"When then this befell, Sophia became very greatly exhausted,

and that lion-faced light-power set to work to take away from Sophia all her light-powers,

and all the material powers of Self-willed surrounded Sophia at the same time and pressed her sore."

(Chapter 31)

That He could create at all must indicate his stature and status amongst the weaklings. He was incomplete, a wounded animal, one that can move and express and be, telling you this, “behold.” Watch fountains of blood issue forth from me. Deep, and wide. What he could not indicate by time, he could show by force of will. The blood of the mother became blood of the son. Here, manifested, a secret altar to a god-damned mother, Wisdom fallen into shadow. In this world of creation, her misshapen son exalted himself over the land, her former province. 

Jesus cautions: blessed is the man who eats the lion, so that the lion becomes human. Woe unto the man eaten by the lion, as he becomes a lion. His form exposes the duality of his nature as, at once, Satan, his own adversary, his vanity, his uncompassionate strength, and his material manipulation of guilt by copulation. If He had been the sky, He could not have taken more for granted. 

He was the Masons, and The Family. He was the priest and the politician. He was any man. He was our Daddy. He was the new embodiment of wisdom. Coincidentally, his time was primarily spent hiding from himself, dwelling on his creation’s mirror of his own iniquities, our commitment to sin, shame, and guilt, of imperfection. God. Dominating, extolling his own virtues, but most of all condemning. Testing. Tempting. 

Resting. 

p - held

With the passage of time,
the depiction becomes less and less sympathetic
to a happy ending for our Sophia.
('31, '70, '73)

Whether the Authority is class and status, purity and the church, or power and sensuality, she pursues gnosis as a way of escaping the laws established to keep her "in her place" with mixed results.

PUZZLE-Mirror