The End of Deception

 

Trickster Pack: At the End of Deception – A Gnostic View of Disclosure

By John Lamb Lash

In a text in the Nag Hammadi collection discovered in Egypt in December 1945, an unnamed teacher declares to his student: “Behold, I shall reveal to you the path of deliverance. Whenever you are seized [in the soul] and undergo mortal fear, a multitude of archons may turn on you, thinking they can capture you. And in particular, three of them will seize you, those who pose as toll collectors. Not only do they demand toll, but they take away souls by theft.” (Nag Hammadi Library in English, ed. by James Robinson, 265)

Consider the information packed into this short paragraph: the certainty of a supernatural confrontation, the mortal fear it inspires, the threat of being captured or taken hostage, the large number of predators, their habit of appearing in threes, the demand for tribute or toll, the feat of abduction (“take away souls by theft”). And the intruders are even named outright: archons.

The First Apocalypse of James, probably written down around 300 CE, presents a glimpse of “higher education” in the Mystery Schools – that is to say, education concerning the supernatural, the paranormal, parapsychology, and the noetic sciences.

The founders and leaders of those schools were ancient seers called Gnostikoi, “those who know divine matters.” Gnostics were the arch-enemies of the early Christian converts and ideologues such as Irenaeus, who established the canon of the four Gospels of the New Testament. In order for Christianity to rise to power and meld with the Roman Empire as a state religion with an agenda of totalitarian mind control, its advocates had to eliminate the competition. Gnostics threatened the salvationist agenda due to something they knew, or claimed to know, about its origins.

Scholars of Gnosticism do not ask why the threat posed by the Mystery adepts was so great and grave that it required centuries of murder, persecution, and intellectual genocide to be eliminated. On the contrary, they routinely assume that Gnostic sects were early, innocuous variations of primitive Christianity. They take the writings found in the Nag Hammadi Codices for out takes of Christian material. That being so, why did the Gnostic message simply not co-exist and mingle with the writings that were to become canonical for the Judeo-Christian faith? Why did they have to be extirpated, root and branch?

The threat posed to Christian ideology by the Gnostic message was very great, indeed. And still is. For one thing, Gnostics asserted that the paternal father god of Jews and Christians alike, Jahweh-Jehovah, was in reality one of the archons. An alien intruder, a hostile ET. And moreover, they insisted that this alien pretender is insane and working against humanity. Needless to say, this proposition was extremely alarming to devotees of the Abrahamic faith. Since the discovery of the Gnostic cache in Egypt in 1945, that alarm is again sounding across the land.

The Sophianic Vision

Extensive noetic and parapsychological training, undertaken in teams (cells) and maintained for generations, allowed adepts of the pre-Christian Mysteries to detect predatory ETs, discern their origin and habitat, identify their forms, and to unmask their motives and methods, as well as how to resist them. That itself was an immense achievement in psychic detection.

But for all their scope and finesse in supernatural matters, the Gnostikoi were also acute observers of the social world. They had a rigorous deconstructive view of history and the belief-systems that drive human behaviour.

 “Pagan adepts from the Mysteries in the Levant and Egypt saw in the salvationist agenda of Abrahamic religion both the evidence and the instrument of archontic deviation” (Not in His Image: Gnostic Vision, Sacred Ecology, and the Future of Belief by John Lamb Lash). The evidence and the instrument.

In other words, they saw in the religious ideology of male-only creation, election, messiahship, atonement, retribution, etc., the evidence of deviant intrusion on the human mind, and they identified that ideology as the very instrument of the intruding force, archons.

This analysis is extremely close to the notion of the “foreign installation,” attributed by Carlos Castaneda to alien intruders called flyers. Interestingly, the made-up Aramaic-Hebrew name, Ialdabaoth, assigned by Gnostics to the archon overlord, may mean “the one who flies or flits around in space.”

Gnostic teachers in the Mysteries were devotees of the goddess called Sophia, “wisdom” in Greek. They were deeply versed in the designs and purposes of this divine power through their method of mathesis, instruction by the Light – that is to say, the primal living radiance of the goddess herself. Gnostics accessed the source of life and consciousness on this planet, for Sophia, although originally a goddess from the galactic centre, had morphed into the material body of our planet. So goes the Gnostic origin myth. Prior to her conversion into materiality, the aeon Sophia (as she was addressed honorifically) had engineered the human genome among the company of gods in the galactic core, the pleroma (“fullness, plenitude”).

In the sacred instruction of the Mysteries, Sophia is both the source of pre-terrestrial humanity, our divine parent, and the setting in which human life unfolds, this planetary habitat. Her biography, the Sophianic origin myth, is the story that guides our species on its proper course of experience. Illumined teachers in the Mysteries taught the three Ss: source, setting, story. Ancient writers assert that all the Mysteries were dedicated to the Magna Mater, the Great Mother, i.e., Sophia embodied in the Earth. Today an appropriate name for the wisdom goddess would be Gaia-Sophia. I suggest the pronunciation So-FI-uh over So-FEE-uh, to distinguish the sacred name from the latter, the common name for a woman: Guy – UH – so – FI – uh.

Error, Not Evil

The Sophianic vision story of the pagan Mysteries is the cosmic biography of Gaia-Sophia, divine wisdom embodied in the Earth. Amazingly, this scenario not only recounts the origin of humanity in the galactic centre, but also the origin of the species of the predatory aliens called archons, who endanger the human adventure in certain ways.

Gnostics saw the threat operating along two trajectories: by psychic intrusion or mental parasitism, and by deviant and insane beliefs framed in religious ideology, such as creation by an off-planet father god, the chosen people, messianic expectations, the redemptive value of suffering, apocalypse, and divine retribution. Indeed, they attribute such beliefs to a kind of channelling from the archons.

In the Gnostic view, the invasion of our world by hostile ETs has been underway for millennia. Via the intrusion of an alien mindset into human consciousness, rather than a physical invasion with saucers and Flash Gordon death-rays. No such event was foreseen by Gnostics, for archons are unable to live in the terrestrial habitat. However, they would have us destroy the home planet out of sheer envy against us, Gnostics cautioned.

Several texts in the Nag Hammadi Library warn explicitly that archons envy humanity for the qualities of freedom and love, not to mention ingenuity and imagination, all of which they lack. These texts state that the envious ETs operate through deception and excel in simulation (Coptic HAL), but basically have no agenda or master plan except to disrupt and confuse. Their plan is “senselessness,” a pointless game of “fear and enslavement” (NHLE, 364-5) to which humans succumb due to egotism. Detesting the innocence and brilliance of the human species, they delight in deception and confusion for its own sake, cosmic spoilers, tricksters bent on absurdity. Our confusion actually entertains them, and they feed vicariously off our fear.

It is important to emphasise that Gnostics did not consider archons to be evil as such. The autonomy of evil and similar propositions are – if you will allow this expression – alien to the Gnostic way of thinking. Gnostic were the cream of pagan intelligentsia. Pagans essentially did not see evil in the cosmos, but they realised the risk of deviance from cosmic harmony. Gnostics refuted the concept of cosmic or “satanic” evil working against humanity. In their view, no one can sin, but we can all make mistakes. And mistakes can be corrected. Even the error of the archons can be corrected.

Mystery teachings do not carry apocalyptic predictions, but the plot of the Sophianic myth contains a key event called “correction” (Greek diorthosis), indicating a decisive moment in the human adventure when we as a species come to terms definitively with the archon problem, the alien presence on Earth. We would resolve and correct that problem through reaching an interactive connection to the wisdom goddess.

Indications point to that moment being now, right now. The decisive factor in the event would not be disclosure, for aliens have been known to lurk around the human world since time immemorial, including many benevolent kinds. Are we to assume there is only one predatory alien, identified by those ancient seers? Well, one is all it takes. And if there were more than one malevolent intruder, and we cannot clearly see even one, we would really be in trouble, wouldn’t we?

What if, at the moment of correction, humanity achieves deliverance from the delusion of the Archons, overthrowing the devious strategy that gives them an advantage in our minds? The follow-up of Gnostic psychic detection would then be deliverance from Archontic influence rather, than disclosure of their presence in some official capacity. But more on this distinction at the close of this article.

Prison Planet

The “foreign installation” or archontic implant may also be regarded as a delusional matrix, a false paradigm. By broad definition a matrix is any setting or habitat: the natural world is the matrix of all terrestrial creatures. Your home is the matrix of your domestic life. Your soul-life is the matrix of your sensibility, aesthetics, ethics. But a matrix can also be a construct of unnatural or inorganic origin. Like a labyrinth or house of mirrors. Like a bureaucracy or government agency, a Kafkaesque impersonal system. Gnostic seers saw the danger of humans getting trapped in such systems, to the extent of becoming soulless and losing our humanity.

In the citation above, the Gnostic master says archons act like toll keepers, or gatekeepers. This allusion is consistent with the Mystery teaching on “planetary spheres” conceived as a maze of confining shells defined by the orbits of the planets in our solar system. This paradigm, leaked from the Mysteries and never widely discussed in the world at large in ancient times, compares the solar system to a multilevel computer game inhabited and guarded by trolls who prohibit passage through the maze unless they are provided with passwords, tolls, or tokens.

In the cynic or fatalistic spin, the “planetary spheres” may be envisioned as a vast penitentiary system where human souls are captured. Misunderstanding of this initiatory concept by those outside the Mysteries led to the assumption that this Earth is a hell-world where the human soul is imprisoned. This ancient teaching is the origin of the “prison planet” meme, a stroke of pagan, pre-Christian and anti-Christian genius. Note that point, Mr Alex Jones.

Gnostics did not view the penitentiary paradigm (which they originated) in that sense. They saw it as a labyrinth of error and illusion, not a diabolical tool of punishment. Behind their view was a sophisticated cosmology that proves to be compatible in many respects with modern Gaia theory. In Gnostic cosmology, the Earth does not properly belong to the celestial clockworks of the solar system but is merely captured in it: an organic planet captured in an inorganic system. Because Sophia permeates life on Earth through and through, and she herself is the ground on which we stand, the air we breathe, this planet is different from the rest of the solar system. It is alive, aware, sentient, nurturing organic life, whereas the other planets such as Mars and Jupiter are inorganic worlds suitable as habitats for inorganic or cyborg entities such as archons.

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