EPILOGUE 777
good creator god of the Bible,^18 now operating demonically down in the realm
of sinister evil. While the creator god loses virtue, he remains almighty, for it
is he who created the world. With his command "Let there be light" (the light
of illusion), Eve and Adam were trapped on earth, and god becomes the war-
den of their human spirit.
By these shifts of power and province, the attributes of the Judeo-Christ-
ian god are divided between the two polar gods. There is the god of spirit,
whose attributes are light and knowledge, and the god of matter, whose at-
tributes are darkness and error. In varying texts, from China to western Eu-
rope, Yahweh takes on nasty and fearful-sounding names, such as Yaldabaoth,
Sakla, and Samael. Like fallen Lucifer, he is the boss and patron of evil, whose
main business occurs on his creations, the earth under its revolving sun star.
Replacing the creator god of illusion at the top is the interior god of light
whose domain is everywhere there is mind. The earth-bound are not pure
matter and darkness, which should be seen as impediments to transcendence,
but also particles of light, which are reached not through the church or the
outer firmament but through meditation. The inner god of light represents
the hope of return.
Clearly, the gnostics turned Judeo-Christian theology upside down. They
had the audacity to make Yahweh into a vain creator of the earth and its
imprisoned inhabitants and, in many scriptures, simply into the devil. This
extreme turnaround must be understood in the historic complexity of gnos-
tic rivalry with Christian orthodoxy and the need of each sect to hide its an-
cestry. The earliest Christians were Jews. Yet in slipping away from Judaism,
Christianity demonized the Jews. So in John 8:44 we have Jesus, a rabbi, ad-
dressing the Jews, saying, "You are from your father the devil." Developing
Christianity essentially deconstructs Judaism, diminishing all, from its Torah
to its "temporal" god. And though it debases the Jews, speaking of their
prophets "whom they murdered" and their god of wrath and revenge as op-
posed to the New Testament god of love and mercy, it must denounce the Jew-
ish god in a confused fashion, since without a scripture of their own, the early
Christian Jews and Christian gentiles of the first and second centuries de-
pended on the Jewish Bible as their own book, as a book that foretells the com-
ing of the Christian messiah. Ultimately, that Jewish earthly messiah will be in
the name of Jesus Christ (Yeshua Mashiah), the foremost god, the immediate
- In some main gnostic treatises Sophia, rather than the biblical god, creates the world and
humans.