I’ve been reading pretty heavily lately into Gnostic mythology (in case you haven’t noticed from my last million and one posts about it). And I wanted to go back in an look at something more closely that I only touched on briefly: namely the Salvation which Jesus Christ is supposed to have brought to the world.

The classic interpretation can be summed up in John 3:16, which is what you always see people holding posters of at football games on tv and whatnot. It essentially says that God loved the world so much that he sacrificed his only son to save us from sin. I already posted about why I think God letting his son be murdered does not equal an act of love.

What I want to go into though, is why such a ludicrous story would have been foisted on people. First off, we should probably take a look at Ransom Theory, which is one of the original models which accounted for Jesus’ death on the cross (although it’s not a popular explanation now).

…as a result of the sin of Adam and Eve, Satan had acquired a formal dominion over, and ownership of, all of humanity and the rest of the world. In order to free people from the grip of Satan, God agreed to arrange the death of Yeshua, his son, as a ransom price to be paid to the devil. This would formally compensate for Adam and Eve’s sin, and would release humanity from Satan’s grip.

The trick was that God resurrected Jesus, so the Devil was left with nothing. So it’s essentially reduced to an economic transaction, and a dishonest one at that. Which is weird. Compare that to Philip K. Dick’s gnostic interpretation of Original Sin:

29. We did not fall because of a moral error; we fell because of an intellectual error: that of taking the phenomenal world as real. Therefore we are morally innocent. It is the Empire in its various disguised polyforms which tells us we have sinned.

In this interpretation, we’re not morally at fault; we’re not all automatically sinners. And the Devil doesn’t have dominion over us because of it. So there is no ransom that needs to be paid. What is Christ’s purpose in this interpretation then? His purpose is to come down and “wake us up” from this false world which we have taken for real. He came to remind us of who we are, and to give us an illuminated path home to salvation through gnosis, or personal knowledge and experience.

Whether or not you accept any of this as real or whatever, I personally find that to be the more satisfying of the two explanations, because it rests ultimate responsibility (and strength) in the hands of the individual. But, if that really WAS Jesus’s original intention and message, why was in changed. Well, you could go into the whole thing about the power structure of the Church and political yadda yadda yadda, and you wouldn’t be wrong. But if you want to be more strictly gnostic about it, you could bring in this whole idea of archons, who are basically equivalent with “agents” in the Matrix. They are sort of soulless mechanical entities whose function is to maintain the security of the phenomenal world, and to make sure that people do not break through to gnosis, and personal knowledge of the godhead.

Some people have also suggested that grey aliens may be manifestations of these cosmic maintenance mechanics, the archons. When people push at the boundaries of the real - sometimes through mental illness - they may encounter these agents/aliens/archons, who exhibit considerable influence in the world we live in, and whose chief is Yahweh, the God of the Old Testament. The gnostics said that Jesus was not the son of Yahweh, who is the false god, but the son of Sophia, the higher Divine Intelligence, and that he penetrated the world controlled by the archons to bring us back to that Holy Wisdom.

The theory is that since Jesus’ true Salvation to us was in the form of knowledge, the only way the archons could combat it was by putting out other information to counter and to obscure it. The fun part of this is that the archons don’t have souls, and don’t understand human emotions. Author Daniel Pinchbeck says:

…they are trying - pathetically and rather desperately - to learn how to feel, and they cannot manage this. It seems that they need the emotions - especially fear - emitted by the human energy body in order to sustain themselves. They recognize their lack of souls, and they suffer for it - if you can accept the paradox of an entity without emotion suffering.

So since they are unable to understand the subtleties of human emotion, the archons cook up this weird cover-story about why Jesus really came here, one which is essentially an economic transaction. One which is a distorted caricature of the way humans really think and feel. One in which God, in the ultimate act of love, murders his own son. But he does it for us, of course. If you were an artificial intelligence (which is sort of how the archons are), and you understood that humans value their offspring very highly but you didn’t really grasp the intricacies of real relationships, you might come up with this sort of slip-shod story.

A friend suggested it was almost like what would happen if a robot tried to bake cookies. Although, maybe they could just follow the recipe. I don’t know. Maybe it’s more like if a robot tried to hug you. Like the hug might be technically proficient, but you would be able to feel that it was all wrong. At least, that’s the theory anyway.