Gnostic Cosmogeny

Welcome to the Gnostic Reformation. My name is Dr. Cyd Ropp and I'm your host. I've had a podcast available on the usual podcast apps for about 2 ½ years now. I don't know how many of my sub stack listeners have started out over on the Gnostic Insights podcast and how many of you overlap. Are you fresh sub stack listeners or are you people that are coming over from the Gnostic Insights podcast? The way I've rolled out the Gnostic Insights podcasts is I've always started chronologically and started with the basic concepts, and then built up the Gnosticism from those basic logical precepts. Gnosticism is very logical—at least this type of Christian Gnosticism that I've been talking to you about. I can't speak to the other form of Gnosticism, which is called Sethian Gnosticism. It's my understanding that Sethian Gnosticism basically derives from Phoenician and Egyptian mythologies. This Christian Gnosticism that I talk about here is a form of philosophy. It is a logical study of consciousness, the origin of consciousness, and how we individual humans—what is our relationship to that original consciousness? So I like to generally begin the discussion at the very beginning and then speak of the cosmogeny as it rolls out and develops. I have not been approaching the sub stack that way. I've been taking various articles on topics and discussing them. But I feel as though now, by this point, I'd like you to have a comprehensive overview of the philosophy that I'm discussing here. Some would say philosophy, some would say religion. It's definitely a religion because it speaks of preeminent existence. It speaks of an ethereal plane, it speaks of the God Above All Gods and the Son. And since it's Christian, it speaks of the Christ. Although all of these words have slightly different meaning than people have become familiar with through conventional Christianity. I argue that it's the original meaning of Christianity before the Pope and the Emperor got their hands on it and changed it all to suit their purposes. So I say that this was the original form of the religion that has come to be called Christianity, but has gotten so twisted around that many people cannot take hold of it. So this is extremely logical, starting from a first principle of consciousness. And I think that anyone who thinks of themselves as an intellectual can appreciate this. You don't have to simply go on faith, which is what the normal retort is when someone says, oh, but why this or why that and God and this and that and usually the answer from believers is, well, you just have to take it on faith. That's what faith is. But this gnostic Christianity is based upon gnosis. Gnosis means knowledge—to know. One of the basic attributes of the creator God Above All Gods is logic, reason, rationality, principles. That is how it is that our universe can hold together and not fly apart. This is a long-winded introduction to say that what I'm going to do now is, for time, we are going to sync up with what I'm teaching over at Gnostic Insights. Because I want you over here on sub stack, if you have not been following Gnostic Insights, I want you over here on sub stack to have the basic principles upon which all of my discussions up to this point here on sub stack have been based. So, again, welcome to the Gnostic Reformation. And here it is—the original proto-Christianity. And welcome aboard to all the new listeners. I've written a couple of books based upon one of the tractates of the Nag Hammadi scriptures, which were buried deep in the desert around 300 AD to save them from the Great Purge that occurred when the Bible was codified by the Pope and the Emperor of Rome and made into the packaged Christianity that we know today. Before that repackaging of Christianity, there was a type of spiritual belief that was well known to Jesus and his followers that was then cut out of the New Testament during the Council of Nicene. These ideas were preserved in a set of books which were buried in the desert of Nag Hammadi, Egypt, to keep them from the purge. This big jug of scrolls was rediscovered and dug up in 1945, which means they were kept away from almost 2000 years of formal academic study and formal religious theology. So what you hear from the Nag Hammadi scriptures is relatively fresh and clean and uninterpreted by experts. I've studied one particular book of the Nag Hammadi called the Tripartite Tractate, and it is that book which I used primarily in the book that I wrote on the subject, called The Gnostic Gospel Illuminated, which I published in 2019. That little book is a non-academic approach to the mythology of what can be called early Gnostic Christianity. The Gnosticism presented in the Tripartite Tractate and my Gnostic Gospel Illuminated is a very early version of Christianity. The reason I say it’s Christian is that there is a figure called the Christ that runs throughout the Tripartite Tractate. There are also many other overlapping ideas that you can still find in the New Testament and traditional Christianity—the Father, the Son, the Fullness of God, the Fall, explanations of virtues and vices and their effects upon our lives, a need for relationship with our ethereal origins and assistance from the Christ. But the meanings of those words have changed so much during these past two thousand years of formal institutional religion that they hardly resemble their original meanings. The Gnostic Gospels use many of the same terms as the Bible, but their interpretation and application is not what they originally were. When Jesus of Nazareth spoke of his Father, for example, who was he talking about? When we read of the Fullness of God in the scriptures approved by the church, what does that mean? When the Bible says that Christ will return with armies of angels to battle for our souls, what exactly is that about? My goal here at Gnostic Insights is to reacquaint modern believers and nonbelievers with what I take to be the original intent of the religion that has come to be known as Christianity, in order to return it to the teachings that Jesus shared before the Nicene Council of the Pope and the Emperor of Rome changed everything to suit their own institutional agendas. To church folks this will initially sound like heresy, while to non-believers it will sound too churchy. To those folks who have fallen away from the church because they can’t reconcile inconsistencies between the Old and the New Testament, it will come as a welcome relief. And to those people who have never believed in God, this version of Christianity may be exactly what they haven’t been expecting and didn’t realize they were hoping for. As I explain these Gnostic Insights to you, I will often use quotes out of the New Testament as well as quotes from the Tripartite Tractate, in order to demonstrate their compatibility. I like to begin talking about gnosis with a study of the cosmos or cosmology as it unfolded, as it rolled out in the beginning. The word for that, by the way, is cosmogeny—the study of origins of the cosmos. This makes the most sense to me—to start at the very beginning and then to go through the entire process of how everything came to be and who the principal players are in this great drama of which we are a part. We will look at the nature of consciousness and how and when it arises. After that we can discuss what happens in our lives and why we are here. We will look at the troubles we are burdened by in our lives and what we can do about them. And after all of that, we can look at the final roll-up at the very end of time as predicted by the scriptures. So let's begin at the beginning, and that has to do with what is called the Father. The story begins before the beginning of time because there was no time before our material cosmos existed. And so you can think of the originating consciousness as a vast consciousness which has no place and no time. No history. It is nothing but pure consciousness without thoug… This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit cydropp.substack.com/subscribe