My mind opened today

[Carla]

Browsing the shelves in the library, I came across a book I've seen several times but never bothered to pick up. Witches, by Michael Jordan. And the book fell open to an interview with Olivia Durdin-Robertson and I read this:

Do you regard yourself as polytheistic?
Yes, I believe in the one God, but I also believe in the three, the God and two more, the God and Goddess emanating, and then the great seven archetypal deities, and then a pantheon, and finally animism because I believe in the Holy Spirit or divine spark in all beings and even in atoms. So I believe in the lot.

But there is a famous quotation from The Golden Ass where Apuleius has Isis say that from her comes every god and goddess, so doesn't that make you a monotheist?
All deities say that, because all deities come from source, including all time and space. Kali says the same thing, and so does Christ. Anyone who represents deity will always BE the one because we all emanate from the one, and if you had a mystical experience, you would be the one!

It's that last bit about all deities saying they are the one because they don't/can't see a separation between themselves and source (because there isn't one)...well that just blew me away. So I checked out the book. I am going to have to copy this quotation out and meditate on this.

 

[Zephyros]

Crowley wrote at length about a concept known as the demiurge; a god who thinks he is the source, but only because he is ignorant of his own creation. I recommend you look into it, it's fascinating.

 

[Carla]

Crowley wrote at length about a concept known as the demiurge; a god who thinks he is the source, but only because he is ignorant of his own creation. I recommend you look into it, it's fascinating.

I've heard of the demiurge, isn't that a gnostic thing? I don't think this is what Robertson was getting at in her statement, though. Do you?

And following on from your comment (at risk of mod wrath), can you recommend a good biography of Crowley? Curious about him. He's from just down the road in Leamington Spa.

 

[Zephyros]

I apologize, my mind tends to be a mishmash of associations. Thelema, Gnosticism, everything is mixed (Crowley himself made play-do of it all anyway). Just what you said about the source made me think about it. I don't know if it's exactly what she was referring to, but I think it's in the same ballpark. I suppose like everything else, Crowley and the Thelemists (cool name for a band!) used terminology taken from different sources to explain themselves.

And boy, did they ever like to explain themselves (at length and in exaggerated detail)!

However, in short, the demiurge can be explained Kabbalistically by placing it at Chesed, below the abyss. Chesed, like, for example, the Four of Discs (Power), is the first Sephira below the Abyss, where things first take on material form. The demiurge is the creator of the perceived world, but he has no notion of the pure potentiality that lays above the Abyss.

I think what the quote refers to could actually touch upon core precepts of Thelema and its supposed pantheon. Nuit represents the infinite, ever expanding, the sum of all potentialities. Hadit on the other hand, is the infinitely small point residing in every object, every particle. Ra-Hoor-Khuit is harder to wrap my own head around, but as far as I can tell, he is the consciousness that links his two parents. But that's an illusion, since we already know that Nuit covers all and is all, so there aren't "three" gods, but one "universe."

I'm sorry if this is coming out obscure; Thelemic minutiae is the ultimate tongue-twister.

I must admit I haven't read a Crowley biography, but mos threads here I see agree that Perdurabo is the best one, although I don't have the name of the author.

 

[Richard]

In Gnostic mythology there is a single Source of everything, sort of an abstract Nothingness as in Qabalah. Other gods emanated from this source. In the Apocryphon of John, the Demiurge (the creator god of the Torah) was illegitimately procreated by one of these gods. The Demiurge, a defective entity, thought that he was the only god. The author of the five books of Moses (the Torah) in the Bible was a victim of this deception. The usual form of monotheism, which assumes that the creator is the only god, is thus a fiction. The more sophisticated monotheism of Gnosticism and Qabalah is not dumbed down enough for the popular religions.

 

[Carla]

In Gnostic mythology there is a single Source of everything, sort of an abstract Nothingness as in Qabalah. Other gods emanated from this source. In the Apocryphon of John, the Demiurge (the creator god of the Torah) was illegitimately procreated by one of these gods. The Demiurge, a defective entity, thought that he was the only god. The author of the five books of Moses (the Torah) in the Bible was a victim of this deception. The usual form of monotheism, which assumes that the creator is the only god, is thus a fiction. The more sophisticated monotheism of Gnosticism and Qabalah is not dumbed down enough for the popular religions.

That is my understanding of the demiurge.

 

[Richard]

Crowley probably thought of himself as a Gnostic. He wrote the Gnostic Mass for the Ecclesia Gnostica Catholica, the ecclesiastical arm of the Thelemic OTO.

 

[Milfoil]

I admit, this is all very new to me. Wiki (yes, I know, not always the best reference) says:

The demiurge is a concept from the Platonic, Neopythagorean, Middle Platonic, and Neoplatonic schools of philosophy for an artisan-like figure responsible for the fashioning and maintenance of the physical universe. The term was subsequently adopted by the Gnostics. Although a fashioner, the demiurge is not necessarily thought of as being the same as the creator figure in the familiar monotheistic sense,[dubious – discuss] because both the demiurge itself plus the material from which the demiurge fashions the universe are considered either uncreated and eternal, or the product of some other being, depending on the system.

The word "demiurge" is an English word from a Latinized form of the Greek δημιουργός, dēmiourgos, literally "public worker", and which was originally a common noun meaning "craftsman" or "artisan", but gradually it came to mean "producer" and eventually "creator".

If I am reading this correctly then the 'artisan' would be each and every one of us (the consciousness of all things which grows and develops), our dreams, our intentions, our actions. When Christ said "I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. (John 14:6) this can then be seen as the divine within. The only way to understand, connect with or experience the Divine, lies within each of us (through ME). Since we were not there, we can't know if there were hand movements or what intonation was given with that statement but EVERYTHING about Christianity hinges upon it.

If this is the case, what kind of hell-on-earth have we dreamed into being?

Am I even close to what demiurge means? Or is it one of those concepts that we could debate till the cows come home?

 

[Richard]

This is drifting away from Carla's OP.

The Platonic Demiurge is benign compared to the Gnostic version. Gnosticism addresses the issue of how a perfect god could create an imperfect world. The explanation is that the world was created by the Demiurge, which is an imperfect god. This, of course, raises several questions, such as how the Demiurge came into being. The Sethian literature goes into detail about this. It is just Gnostic mythology, not a matter for debate. (Of course, mythology may have metaphorical significance for an individual, but that is a personal matter.)

A comment on the OP. If a mystic claims to be God, it is a simple statement of fact (a mystical union with God). However, if someone were to say, "I am God, but Carla and Milfoil are not God, because there is only one God, and I am It," then this would be be evidence of megalomania.

 

[Carla]

My original post was just trying to express the glimmer of what the gods and goddesses could mean to me, a flash of insight brought on by reading that quote. How the gods can make the claims they allegedly make. How they can be seen as emanations of the same thing. These are things that cannot be expressed in words, at least not by me. I have thought them before, but thinking them and feeling them the way I did in that moment are not even close to the same thing.