Demiurgeous by Mike Kay

 

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I awoke from a particularly haunting dream.

The dream itself was about the structure of the Cosmos.

I rose out of bed, sitting very still in the dark.

A force suddenly took hold of me, that it was a force was quite clear, for it was beyond my ability to attribute it to any foundation of thought.

It was like the rush of a flash flood.

It moved directly up my spine with an irresistible direction and speed.

It arrived at my crown, and it revealed itself.

A great serpentine form made visible with the head of a Lion.

I was the Lion.

Demiurgeous Lives.

There are those who will tell you that the Demiurge is some type of creature that inhabits the universe, the way perhaps that a certain type of tree might inhabit a forest. For many, the Demiurge is simply a concept, something understood by the mind as perhaps a god amongst an entire collection of gods. For still others the Demiurge is a form of belief, a part of a world view, but no one ever seems to describe the Demiurge as a facet of intimate reality, one which places the modern understanding of reality and existence upon its ear. This piece is about such an ultimate condition.

Demiurgeous is an ancient Greek word, with the rather humble association of public works. Anglicized, the word is shortened to Demiurge. Public works are easily discernible, available to simple perception by the dullest of individuals. It requires no special intelligence to understand that they exist, even if the hand that shaped them is not currently visible.

The ancient Greeks saw their civilization as following the structure of cosmic order, thus those hands that structured their society were participants in the same acts that built the universe. Following such reasoning, the public works in civilization brought the public works of the cosmos into direct view.

The dominance of the Abrahamic religions, if one wishes to call them that, have largely erased this perspective from the modern mind. Like most acts of simplification, abrahamism is responsible for a loss of connectivity between the specific and the greater milieu, which in this case is humankinds’ place in the cosmos. This great achievement of simplification has made it impossible for most to understand the undeniable requirement for a Demiurge in the scope of creation.

Thus, the origin of the Demiurge derives from that great ancient tradition of mysticism that perhaps experienced its last great florescence with the Gnostics. The cosmos requires a unifying force, one which returns soundness to the dizzying plethora of creation. It is a mystical truth that the forces that break down and differentiate must be paired with their complement, and it is that regenerative force which pulls together the disparate and the different into the sensible whole which is the realm of the Demiurge.  Over the centuries, Gnosticism spontaneously arose in the abrahamic world, largely met, as it is today, with the paroxysm of genocide, but it was not the Gnostic who first illustrated the phenomenal world as an act of organization, that particular understanding was derived long before them.

The Demiurge arises out of a particularly sophisticated understanding of creation, one where any particular manifestation is dependent upon a previous and more powerful hypostasis. Thus, as one ascends to ever higher and finer states, one comes ever closer to Source itself, that incomprehensible ultimate reality that defies any concept, any emotion, any image. We refer to this manifestation as Emanation.

Such a view of the universe was rationally proven by Proclus, and mathematically proven by Kurt Gödel, as I have documented in an earlier piece. Experientially, this view arrives a priori, one whereby a reality is established, and the philosophy derived from it becomes the manner by which its power is actualized in the psyche, and the world.

Thus, the Demiurge is in fact, not a creator, nor is he truly evil, unless all of manifestation itself can be seen as evil, in which case, any understanding of good and evil as truths become arbitrary. The ancients knew this, of course, and they had the mystical experiences, as well as the rational philosophy, to make sense of it all. Today, the situation is completely different. The modern mind cannot slake its thirst on the concrete simplicity it demands of its reality, yet it cannot abide the responsibility of the explanation it so desperately seeks.

The God of the Abrahamics is not the incomprehensible source. This confusion arises out of the demand for simplicity. The complexity of emanation science is that cosmic organization is not some event from the distant past that happened and now everyone talks about. The organization of the cosmos is an ever-present event, an unending flow, a constant wave that is never in stasis. It is the ultimate definition of the eternal present.

So where, exactly, does the idea of an evil demiurge derive from? The answer is found in an unfortunate development in human consciousness that began about 6,500 years ago, with the first development of complex civilization in the Fertile Crescent. We may recall that Jean Gebser documents how consciousness develops through differentiation and that as consciousness moves into new modalities, it doesn’t truly abandon, but rather builds upon previous states. Thus, the idea of evil as an entity, as a substantive force in the world, first emerged in consciousness in this place, and at that time, to become foundational in modern understanding.

The abrahamics arose with this new development, becoming fully defined by it. The need to expunge the evil element, to deny it, to exorcise it, or conversely to embrace it and devote oneself to it, became the defining notion of Abrahamic justification. Thus, the abrahamics became the first official religions to regularly practice projection as an aspect of religious faith. There are plenty of examples of this. The scapegoat was a regular observation in what is now Israel, whereby the sins and evil of the group were projected upon some unfortunate who was summarily thrashed in an episode of cathartic release. The idea that god would become enraged by having his corpus of rules ignored and disobeyed, to act out his rage in some form of apoplexy, followed by a torrent of mindless destruction, the belief that only those who followed the Abrahamic way would be saved, whilst all others faced annihilation. This construct remains a fundamental pillar of this type of consciousness. Thus, the Demiurge, in the eyes of the abrahamics, became the Cosmocrater, the Great Satan.

Currently, Demiurge has become a kind of shorthand for evil god. Certainly some of this has been advanced in the 20th century through those who held to an essentially abrahamic world view. Much of the current popularity of this notion comes from those living in the dissolving modern world, and desiring some explanation for this mess.

However this may be, the Demiurge is not available to modern reinterpretation, whilst remaining the Demiurge. Modern interpretation ignores the internal, invisible manifestation of the Demiurge. It cannot account for the astounding magic and complexity in the natural world, nor does it allow for emanation as a proven condition of creation to be explained in the most baisic of contexts.

Yet perhaps the greatest barrier to any modern understanding of the Demiurge stems from a blatant inability to view the universe as anything beyond dead, inert matter. The dead universe theory derived from the dead world theory, and both owe their ascendency to the abrahamic world view. In short, the dead universe gained traction within the Christian view, because it coupled with the notion that God and creation were two, that god built the universe in the form of rigid natural laws, and that the absentee landlord could be somehow transcendent to this activity, which explained to the simple why it appeared as if he didn’t exist.

To this day, the philosophy of the dead universe remains powerful to the modern mind. The problems associated with the dead universe are present and accounted for, from moral ambiguity, to explaining the nature of existence with anything beyond platitudes, yet for us here, the single most significant obstacle raised by the edifice of dead universe belief is that it absolutely cannot imagine a purpose for the force of cosmic regeneration.

Truly, it is only when life is returned to the universe as an inherent and luminous quality that mind, soul, and purpose begin to shine forth. Suddenly, the individual becomes, not simply an expression of dead laws, but an act of significance to the entire moving image of eternity. It is here where one arrives at the mystery of microcosm and macrocosm, and the dual forces of differentiation and unification play against each other in a dynamic dance that given purpose and meaning within the human experience.

The mystical reality of the demiurgic role cannot be comprehended as a completely foreign or alien power at work, yet equally, such is not a sphere that the incarnate mind can in any way use its discernment tools to decode. The work of the Demiurge is at once perplexing, challenging, and unstoppable. The ancient Hermetic texts, however, provide a rudder in the storm, for as the Thrice Great instructs us, what unfolds above, also does so below, and mystics have long used the imagery of man as the model for the cosmos.

Indeed, the Demiurge is a demanding master, sending himself, and all of his rays of emanation upon a quest through devastation to return to the soundness from which he sprang. Such a quest can only make sense if one follows with a certain continuity of the essence of life itself, that the struggles of the mineral, vegetable, and animal all form a small point in the vast image that is the cosmos. Inherent in such an image is the motive force of Death, yet Death itself must give way to a higher hypostasis, one in which the essence of mankind can indeed play a role.

Nowhere is any of this work assured. Certainly, some might view as evil the impetus towards a hazardous and uncertain journey that can rob one of all they have, all they might become. Thus the Demiurge is seen as evil in certain spiritual perspectives as well. This cosmos, for instance, was not the first one so organized; there was a predecessor, one which utterly failed in all its lofty aims.

Yet the insensate matter championed by the modern mind is incapable of providing any meaning for the existence it claims to objectify. Further, dead forces cannot escape the trap they create for themselves, which is the manner by which they manifest. If there is any psychological or spiritual aspect to the dead matter perspective, it is at best a dalliance, or a fanciful kind of wish fulfillment cast before the cold amoral hands of the headless universe.

Such explains much of the behavior of the wealthiest and most influential in the world today, while also demonstrating irrevocably, that the claims of moral high ground by the abrahamic world ring hollow. It is indeed ridiculous to brand the Demiurge as evil when the pointing finger itself derives from a complex of beliefs which themselves have birthed a monster.

The Demiurge was comprehended long ago, by great mystics and seers. He exists both as a facet of creation itself, and as a guiding principle within the science of emanation. The mystical reality of the Demiurge is informed by the work of the world’s greatest philosophers and mathematicians, and further by direct a priori experience. The work of the Demiurge, the reclaiming of wholeness in a cosmos of disunity, is an act whereby the path of return to indescribable source is kindled from the chaff of human existence.

There is far more that could be written, from the origin of mankind, to the detailing of how the Demiurge manifests in the unfolding of the rays of emanation. Yet the scope, and purpose here was to establish the realm of the Demiurge as extending to the innermost mystery of humankind.