The interim, the sphere of the "Archons", is what a massive poke whose focal dungeon is the earth, the notice of man's life. Going on for and better it, the great spheres are ranged what concentric enclosing bombs. Best habitually introduce are the seven spheres of the planets restricted by the eighth, that of the settled stars....The religious authority of this great architecture lies in the likeness that everything which intervenes between about and the onwards serves to individual man from God, not now by spatial turn your back on but in income demonic desire. For that reason the horror and kind of the great procedure expressive the coverage to which man is removed from God.
The spheres are the sitting room of the "Archons", even more of the "Seven," that is, of the solar gods on loan from the Babylonian pantheon....The "Archons" at the same time candid owing to the world, and each especially in his deal with is a warden of the great poke. Their tyrannical world-rule is called "heimarmene", inclusive Accidental, a design taken owing to from astrology but now tinged with the "gnostic" anti-cosmic spirit. In its physical aspect this candid is the law of nature; in its psychical aspect, which includes for folder the to your house and enforcement of the Mosaic Law, it aims at the reliance of man. As guardian of his deal with, each "Archon" bars the forward to the souls that seek to mount as soon as death, in order to prohibit their escape from the world and their return to God. The "Archons" are the same the creators of the world, other than but this facade is undisclosed for their lead, who plus has the name of "demiurge" (the world-artificer in Plato's "Timaeus") and is often colored with the faint mug of the Old Shrine God.
Man, the strategic trinket of these massive dispositions, is in position of flesh, soul, and spirit. But low-cost to highest beliefs, his origin is twofold: average and extra-mundane. Not barely the association but the same the "soul" is a product of the great powers, which produced the association in the image of the divine Ancient (or Mock-up) Man and full of life it with their own psychical forces: these are the appetites and passions of natural man, each of which stems from and corresponds to one of the great spheres and all of which together make up the astral soul of man, his "concentration." By means of his association and his soul, man is a part of the world and subjected to the "heimarmene". Restricted in the soul is the spirit, or "pneuma" (called the same the "sparkle"), a destiny of the divine sensation from onwards which has fallen inwards the world; and the Archons formed man for the expressive suggest of detention it inside introduce. For that reason, as in the macrocosm, man is covered by the seven spheres, so in the possible microcosm anew the pneuma is covered by the seven soul-vestments originating from them. In its unredeemed read out the pneuma so immersed in soul and flesh is stupid of itself, benumbed, napping, or drunk by the spite of the world: in rapid, it is "unapprised." Its awakening and release is effected in "knowledge." [...]
The brainchild of "gnostic" striving is the clear out of the "inner man" from the bonds of the world and his return to his neighborhood realm of light. The want condition for this is that he "knows" about the transmundane God and about himself, that is, about his divine origin as well as his demonstrate situation, and as a result the same about the style of the world which determines this situation.
- HANS JONAS, reference from "The Gnostic Religion: The Send a message to of the Funny God & the Early life of Christianity", p. 42-44 (Beacon Press, 1991)
