The Apocryphon of John: The Demiurge and the Light Trapped Below

After the crucifixion, John is standing near the Temple, grieving, when the sky opens. A luminous being descends — shifting between the form of a child, an old man, a servant — and says to him: Why do you weep? What follows is the most complete surviving account of Gnostic cosmogony: the secret history of why the world is the way it is.

The true God, the invisible Father, is entirely beyond description — not this or that, not here or there, not maker or destroyer, simply the infinite ground of light. From this ground, by a process of reflection and emanation, a realm of divine aeons comes into being — the Pleroma, the Fullness. Everything there is perfect.

Then Sophia, the feminine aeon of Wisdom, makes a mistake. She desires to generate something from herself, without her consort, without the Father's consent — an act of autonomous creation. What emerges is a monstrous being: lion-faced, serpent-bodied, with eyes that flash like lightning. Horrified, she hides it in a luminous cloud so none of the other divine beings will see what she has done.

This hidden being — Yaltabaoth — grows powerful. He steals a fragment of his mother's light. And in his ignorance of where he came from, he makes the declaration that damns him: I am God and there is no other God beside me. The Gnostic reading of this line is devastating: the God who says this is the God of the Old Testament. And the very fact that he says it — the jealousy, the competition — proves he is not the highest. A truly supreme God has nothing to be jealous of.

Yaltabaoth and his subordinate archons then create humanity — not as beloved children but as vessels to hold the stolen light, keeping it from returning to its source. The material body is a prison.

But the luminous Christ descends into the prison and calls to the sleeping divine spark within every human being: Arise and remember that it is you who hearkened. The spark is already divine. It does not need to become something it is not. It needs only to wake up and remember what it already is.

This is the most radical inversion of Genesis ever written: the same garden, the same characters, the same story — with every moral valence reversed.