#I'm not sure where the gnosticism onion came from but apparently I'm running with that metaphor so apologies for that

[ossidae-passeridae]

I'd be fascinated to hear more about gnosticism in tlt if you ever feel like writing about it.

I honestly don't know what's already been written r.e. gnosticism and TLT, so might be reinventing the wheel here, but I'll do a brief description of the overarching themes present throughout the books?

The uh, first layer of the gnosticism onion, as it were.

So to start this off I'm going to give a broad and at least partially incorrect overview of gnosticism:

Gnosticism is a tenth century mess that's loosely based off of Christianity, but then gets Weird. Thanks to some fun political situations in the Gulf, the Christians in the South were isolated from other Christians for decades thus spun off wildly from "mainstream" Christianity. We mostly have fragments left, and a lot of them contradict each other, so working out exactly what they believed/meant is Very Fun and also Somewhat Impossible. (Like the fragments of documents left in Canaan House, you could say...)

That being said, parts of their beliefs we do know better than others. They have the bible, of course, but on top of that they also have this pre-Bible creation myth regarding how God came to be in the first place.

It goes something like: In The Beginning there was a sort of primordial god-soup. This god-soup occasionally emits binary pairs of entities, also known as aeons and (later) twin flames. These binary pairs are two souls made for one another and with one another, and together they are balanced, and perfect, and full of Holy Light(tm). Each binary pair had one grammatically-masculine name, and one grammatically-feminine name. These names do not necessarily relate to perceived gender, and in fact the binary pairs are often referred to as if they are Beyond Gender Altogether. (*stares pointedly at the Lyctors*, *stares even more pointedly at Gideon's name*) [I could probably write a whole thing on this alone, honestly, they're sometimes referred to as like, the fingers on God's hand which, yeah.]

Anyway, in this pure and godly space, there is no matter, only Holy Light. But one of the entities, known as Sophia, goes off on her own and interacts with the shadowy chaos that exists outside of the godly soup. She's half of a whole, unbalanced. And through her meddling she (unintentionally) creates another half that's not pure and holy and full of godly light, but instead a dark reflection of what he Should Be. This is generally referred to as the Demiurge.

Unlike all these other beings, the Demiurge is made of matter. He is the first thing of matter to exist and he looks around the void that he's birthed into, bare aside from him, and concludes that he and he alone is God. (Hi Jod)

Then he makes earth, and heaven, and a bunch of other things besides, the things we know as the universe today. In the immortal words of Douglass Adams — this has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.

The problem is — all of these things that the Demiurge has created are made of matter. And being made of matter, they're cut off from the light of Godness (which is incorporeal and made of Pure Energy), thus inherently flawed. What's more, they're never meant to have existed in the first place. The Demiurge is tormented by his failure, but unable to create anything that is not inherently Wrong. (oh look it's the Nine Houses, I'd bet money that there's a link between being cut off from Godly Light and the Nine Houses being the only stable thanergenic planets here)

Sophia, who has watched these unintended consequences unfold and the suffering they've caused, cannot undo what's been done, but she can descend into the material world to share the light of wisdom and try to alleviate what suffering she can. So she does.

The story culminates with Christ being born and teaching all of humanity Gnosis — a special, mystical knowledge that can only come from the Divine, we are not really given specifics here — before he's sacrificed in order to make humanity's ascent beyond their material prison possible.

So that's the broad strokes of gnosticism as a religion, and also first layer of the TLT gnosticism onion. Just the really broad spectrum thematic *waves hands around* Stuff. I've refrained from speculating on the end because until Alecto comes out we really don't know.

If you want anything more specific anon, let me know?? I've been in the gnosticism soup for so long I can't always tell what's common knowledge and what isn't.