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Demiurge The ancient Gnostics were named after gnôsis, the Greek word for knowledge or insight. Gnosticism was a loosely organized philosophical movement that flourished in the 1st and 2nd centuries AD. The Gnostics believed that the material world was the result of a primordial error on the part of a divine being (usually called Sophia [Wisdom] or the Logos). They attributed the creation and control of the material world to a semi-divine, ignorant creature known, who was called, Saklas (the fool) Ialdabaoth (the blind god) the Demiurge (from the Greek dêmiourgos which means craftsman, but which the Gnostics meant as the architect or lesser creative force). In Gnostic mythology/cosmology, both Sophia and the Demiurge are subordinate to the Supreme Being/Cosmos (God). The Demiurge was antagonistic to anything spiritual, and had a group of servants known as the Archons (Greek meaning ruler). The research of Gnostic scholar John Lash reveals that the Gnostics were early mystic shamans who reached high states of consciousness, knew their direct connection with the Cosmos and honored the importance of the female principle (Sophia) to live balanced lives. He concludes that the Catholic Church feared their power, so it killed them and banished the survivors underground. The Dead Sea Scrolls discovered in Qumran Palestine and the Nag Hammadi Codices discovered in Egypt (both in the 1940s) are important Gnostic texts which expose the truth about the Archons. Here is a quote from the Apocryphon of John, a Nag Hammadi text: "They sought to overpower humanity in its psychological and perceptual functions… although they saw that human thinking was superior to theirs… For indeed their delight is bitter and their beauty is depraved. And their triumph is in deception (apaton), leading astray, for their own structure is without divinity." The Gnostics were postulating the idea of a predatory alien presence that took delight in others' pain and that used deception as a tool. Disconnected from their own power ("without divinity"), they became parasites that had to hijack the energy of others to survive...