Life After Death_ A History of the Afterlife in Western Religion - Alan Segal [342]
So the Hypostasis of the Archons is using the text of the Old Testament turned around for the purposes of engaging in a mythological polemic. The saving gnōsis turns out to be that we are trapped in this irredeemable world and the Gnostics are the only ones who know it. Because they know it, they know that they must get out of it to communicate again with the God of salvation. Matter and materiality are evil; they prevent us from perceiving the truth.
The salvation (gnōsis) that these Gnostics seek is a variation on the immortality of the soul, which must free itself from the dirty, ignorant, irredeemable universe in which it is trapped. The cosmic conflict between the Archons (Rulers) and Incorruptibility expresses the “battle” between the body and soul (who are the Jews or the ordinary Christians as opposed to the saving remnant the Christians), the body of the church and its soul (the mass of the church as opposed to its Gnostic elite), and most emphatically, the “orthodox” Church Fathers and the “Gnostics.” As myth does everywhere, the moral appears repeated on many levels simultaneously. The Archons are as much the evil rulers of the church as they are the evil rulers of the universe. This is a case of cosmology being used to define soteriology and hence, also, to define the transcendent part of the self.
The Hypostasis of the Archons can be divided into two sections: The first is the creation of the world as a result of the battle between the Archons and Incorruptibility, and the second, the attempted rape of Eve and Norea, resulting in Eleleth’s revelation to Norea. The first section explains that the creation of the world was ascribed to Archons. One of these Archons is the god Ialdabaoth, also known as Samael, the creator god of Genesis. Man was also a creation of these lower powers, but his soul was either a divine spark or breath implanted in the mortal flesh by the Supreme God.
The Archons create Adam in an attempt to trap Incorruptibility, the Female Spiritual Principle. The Archons repeatedly attempt to rape the physical female characters in order to defile the spirit that they embody. The first instance of rape occurs directly after the creation of Eve.
Then the Archons (authorities) came up to their Adam. And when they saw his female counterpart speaking with him, they became agitated with great agitation; and they became enamored of her. They said to one another, “Come, let us sow our seed in her,” and they pursued her. And she laughed at them for their folly and their blindness; and in their clutches she became a tree, and left before them a shadow of herself resembling herself; and they defiled [it] foully. (Hyp. Arch. 89:17-28)
Eve’s transformation into the tree reflects her position as the embodiment of the Female Spiritual Principle-that is, Wisdom. The story itself is likely a borrowed trope from the story of Apollo and Daphne (Laurel), pulled into the narrative. In the original story, the gods turn Daphne into the beautiful plant to escape being raped by Apollo, so the story is very apt for the context. The implications are Biblical: She becomes the “Tree of Life” described in Genesis 2:9, which is specifically equated with Wisdom in the book of Proverbs, though the text itself has to be forced a bit to come up with the rape: “She is a tree of life to those who lay hold of her; those who hold her fast are happy” (Prov 3:18). This mixture of Hellenistic and Hebrew traditions, brought together in a completely new and polemical narrative, is typical of the Sethian tradition.
The second woman who the Archons attempt to rape in the text is Eve’s daughter Norea. Norea is Seth’s (otherwise unknown) sister, who Eve bears after the death of Abel.