What Are Archons

Welcome back to Gnostic Insights and the Gnostic Reformation on Substack. This is a repeat of an earlier podcast. It’s the most complete explanation I’ve ever given on archons, and since I mentioned archons in last week’s episode, I wanted to give the full explanation of what are archons, because archons are mentioned quite often in Gnostic circles.

Also, a piece of news, the children’s book is completed. It’s gorgeous. It’s exciting. It’s for the little ones. It’s for you to read to your children or grandchildren, ages two to six, probably. Beautiful illustrations, and it’s the very simplest rendition of our Gnostic Gospel possible. Imagine—I’ve simplified the Christian Gnostic Gospel, although I don’t mention Jesus or Christ. I talk about the Prince of Peace in this book, and it’s the nugget of Gnosis.

So if you’re struggling with Gnosis at all, I’m sure you can understand this children’s book. I’ve published it to Amazon. It probably won’t appear for about a week. They need to do their thing on their end with it. It’s only $9.99, which is the very cheapest Amazon would let me sell it for. The name of the children’s book on Amazon is Children of the Fullness: A Gnostic Myth.

Okay, onward and upward, and here’s What Are Archons.

This episode is about archons. It’s kind of a long episode because what I’m going to do is read to you directly out of the Tripartite Tractate and then make explanations about that, and that’s a long process. Also, if this becomes too thick and too difficult to understand just by the hearing of it, go to GnosticInsights.com and read the transcript. And in the transcript, I’m going to put links to other episodes that have spoken on this sort of topic before so that you can have a bigger review or a more in-depth study on this topic, okay?

So reading from the Tripartite Tractate, and this version is translated by Einar Thomassen out of the book, The Nag Hammadi Scriptures, edited by Marvin Meyer. I’m reading you three different sections out of the book. The first is called The Word Divided, and that’s verses 77:11–36.

“Now on the one hand, The word gave birth to himself as a perfect single one, to the glory of the Father who had desired him and was pleased with him. The things he had wished to grasp and reach, however, he produced as shadows, phantoms, and imitations. For he could not bear to look at the light, but looked at the depths, and he faltered. Because of this, he suffered a division and a turning away. From the faltering and the division came oblivion and ignorance of oneself and of that which is.”

So when this section says the word gave birth to himself as a perfect single one, the word is Logos. That’s another way of saying the Aeon named Logos.

And “the perfect single one” is the name for the overarching personality of the Aeon known as Logos. Here at The Simple Explanation of things, we call that the governing unit of consciousness. For example, my body has billions of little units of consciousness in the form of cells and organs and whatnot, but my single one is named Cyd, and that’s my governing unit of consciousness.

Within the overarching personality of Logos, was a fractal iteration of every Aeon, one level down from Logos, housed within his perfect single self.

Logos was a product of the entire Fullness giving glory to the Father in unison, and all together they fruited this final combinatory Aeon. He was the last Aeon to be born, and he was the sum of all of the Aeons. And those smaller images of the Aeons that were contained within the single one named Logos were all fractals of the Fullnesses of God, one level down. And Logos birthed himself in the sense that his personality, his unified governing unit of consciousness, became aware of itself in relation to this fractal pleroma that he contained.

“It was the will of the Father that brought Logos forth as the cause that made an ordained economy come to pass.”

And that ordained economy, that’s our material universe, and that includes time and space. And then it says,

“The things he had wished to grasp and reach, however, he produced as shadows, phantoms, and imitations.”

You see, what Logos wanted to do was create Paradise, basically, all by himself, because he had fractals of the entirety within himself. But he didn’t realize that they were only fractals, and the fractals couldn’t get the job done. It needed to be Logos in combination with the real Aeons that were up there at his level. And so when he reached for the Father, that’s what caused the Fall. And the deficient things that issued forth from the Fallen Logos were patterned after his ego, not his one undivided self. “They we