The ‘worldbuilding’ of it is quite cool. Funny worm god (yaldabaoth), interesting ‘secret twist’. Ties to more ancient religions (manichaeism).
Shame that one of the primary historical ‘reasons’ it exists is antisemitism. TLDR, is it was made as kinda of a way to say ‘the old testament (jewish) god was a fake evil demiurge, and to worship him is to worship evil’. So, just a different way of wording ‘jews actually worship satan’.
Yes, but its beside the point. With Jesus being jewish, its jews who ‘tricked’ people into worshipping the demiurge. Its that classic “jews are tricksters, christains are just people who got tricked” bullshit. And, just overall, a lot of their teachings are just, inherently ‘twisting’ a lot of jewish era mysticism around, which is of course funny in a way, considering how much they also steal from jewish mysticism.
Regardless, all of that is more or less history; I don’t think people calling themselves gnostic today are generally specifically anti-semetic. And its not like Christianity of the era was particularly accepting of jews.
Jewish gnosticism also existed, maybe even before Christian gnosticism. Arguably Christianity grew out of a Jewish gnostic movement.
I think that some Jewish sects differentiate between the gods “El” and “Yahweh” from the old testament and they consider “El” to be the demiurge and “Yahweh” to be the god of light.
It would make sense that this occurred after some heavy cultural borrowing from the zoroastrian Persians who had a dualistic cosmology
The ‘worldbuilding’ of it is quite cool. Funny worm god (yaldabaoth), interesting ‘secret twist’. Ties to more ancient religions (manichaeism).
Shame that one of the primary historical ‘reasons’ it exists is antisemitism. TLDR, is it was made as kinda of a way to say ‘the old testament (jewish) god was a fake evil demiurge, and to worship him is to worship evil’. So, just a different way of wording ‘jews actually worship satan’.
dont christians also worship the demiurge?
Yes, but its beside the point. With Jesus being jewish, its jews who ‘tricked’ people into worshipping the demiurge. Its that classic “jews are tricksters, christains are just people who got tricked” bullshit. And, just overall, a lot of their teachings are just, inherently ‘twisting’ a lot of jewish era mysticism around, which is of course funny in a way, considering how much they also steal from jewish mysticism.
Regardless, all of that is more or less history; I don’t think people calling themselves gnostic today are generally specifically anti-semetic. And its not like Christianity of the era was particularly accepting of jews.
Jewish gnosticism also existed, maybe even before Christian gnosticism. Arguably Christianity grew out of a Jewish gnostic movement. I think that some Jewish sects differentiate between the gods “El” and “Yahweh” from the old testament and they consider “El” to be the demiurge and “Yahweh” to be the god of light.
It would make sense that this occurred after some heavy cultural borrowing from the zoroastrian Persians who had a dualistic cosmology
He comes across evil in the book