Generation of the Aeons

Welcome back to Gnostic Insights and to the Gnostic Reformation on Substack. I&#8217;m currently teaching my second round of Gnostic Insights to the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute, also known as OLLI, at Southern Oregon University, and we&#8217;re going through step by step this concept of Gnosticism that I share with you here at Gnostic Insights and on the Gnostic Reformation. So I&#8217;m going to back up with you and take a deep dive into the scriptures of the Tripartite Tractate that we use as the basis here for the Gnosticism that I share with you. Today we&#8217;re going to talk about how the Aeons of the Fullness of God were generated. And the reason we talk about the Aeons so much is because we are downstream from the Aeons. We are representatives of all of the traits of the Aeons—we second-order powers, and we humans in particular, since I am a human talking to other humans here. So everything I say about the Aeons and how they relate to the Father and how they relate to the Son and to each other, we have that nature inside of us as well, because it is a flowing stream of consciousness that begins at the Father, passes through the Son, passes through the totalities and into the Aeons, and then down into us. So let&#8217;s review this basic Gnostic wisdom here. The instant the all became self-aware, the all fell out of their unthinking, blissful union as one, and arranged themselves into what&#8217;s called the Fullness. “Each one of the Aeons is a name, that is, each of the properties and powers of the Father, since he exists in many names, which are intermingled and harmonious with one another, just as the Father is a single name, because he is a unity, yet is innumerable in his properties and names.” By this point in the Tripartite Tractate, the Son comes to be referred to as the Father, because the Son is the Father of the third glory, that is, the Aeons of the Fullness. We see here that the Son, although a singular monad, is still a unity of many Aeons. The Son becomes knowable through the innumerable properties and names of the Aeons. What does it mean by names? I think that these names are the first appearance of what we would come to call ego. These disparate identities include names like flower, tree, dog, human, even parts of living bodies who themselves are alive, like kidney cells. They&#8217;re not names like my name or like Frank or George. They are not those types of identities. These are functional identities. The Aeons then arrange themselves into a hierarchy of, &#8220;minds of minds, which are found to be words of words, elders of elders, degrees of degrees, which are exalted above one another. Each one of those who give glory has his place and his exaltation and his dwelling and his rest, which consists of the glory which he brings forth.” Now, the hierarchy of the Fullness prefigures the fractal patterns of our universe. Minds over minds, words over words, superiors over superiors, as Thomason&#8217;s translation puts it, refers to the personalities and how they relate to one another. Elders of elders and degrees of degrees refers to the manner by which things are sorted, stacked, and ordered—first, second, third, superior, inferior, and so on. Each with its own place, exaltation, dwelling, and rest reflects the fact that each self-aware entity has its own unique place in the grand scheme, its own personal expression or exaltation, a location different than its neighbors, thus possessing its very own point of view. So it&#8217;s not about hierarchies of men the way humans tend to think of it. It&#8217;s not about, well—look at the hierarchy of government or the hierarchy of the Catholic church. It&#8217;s not about the peons at the bottom, and then you come a little higher into the elders, and then you have the priests, and then you have the cardinals, and bishops, and the pope. That isn&#8217;t the kind of hierarchy we&#8217;re talking about. It&#8217;s the way that our bodies go together, for example. Our cells are smaller than our organs. Our organs are smaller than the organism. They stack upward, and part of the Gnostic gospel is the higher the fewer precept. <img loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="901" height="588" src="https://gnosticinsights.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/basic_hierarchy_w_forceknots-1.jpg" alt="" class="wp-image-2077" srcset="https://i0.wp.com/gnosticinsigh