Dear Friends,
I am posting my response to a question in our Yahoo chat room about
the meaning of the term “archon.” I hope this very brief discussion
may interest you in finding more about the subject, perhaps in the
Nag Hammadi text “Hypostasis of the Archons.”
I will be posting a brief discussion before the end of the week in
combination with this one — What is an “Aeon”?
-Matthew
Here is the archon discussion:
An archon, sometimes translated as a “power,” is a spiritual entity
or force that serves the demiurge, the creator of the physical
world. To be really crude about it you could say they are bad
angels, but it is a lot more complicated than that.. just consider
them the forces that define and limit physical existence.
One of the Nag Hammadi texts is called the “Hypostasis of the
Archons,” and has a mythological discussion of their nature.
You know how in Christian mythology there are some beings
called “archangels?” That is borrowed from this same greek word,
meaning “ruler..” so an arch-angel is an angel that is really
powerful and rules over the others, whereas in Gnosticism the
archons are the “rulers of this world,” the princes of the world
that Christ referred to, for example, in the story of Christ being
tempted in the desert. The tempter shows him the world and promises
to give him the “principalities of the world” if he will bow down in
homage…and we would interpret those principalities as the realms
of the archons, so to speak.
The thing I should caution you against is thinking that they
are “demons” or something like that… there are no demons or devils
per se in Gnosticism, because ultimately there is no metaphysical
category of “evil,” just various forms of imperfection. The
demiurge is in some way the full realization of imperfection, just
as God is of perfection. The demiurge personifies and draws within
himself the ultimate manifestations of physical form, limitation,
physical space, time, as well as the dimensions of space-time, as
well as natural laws and natural processes that govern the physical
world — including the law that everything that lives must die.
+Matthew
Leave a comment