Angels-GNOSTICISM

Gnosticism embodies a complex of related sects and religious writings
that together constituted a major movement in the early centuries of
the Christian era. Although the thoughtway of Gnosticism was not
exclusively Christian, Gnostic Christianity was a significant competitor
with what became the Christian mainstream. The numerous beings
with which Gnosticism populated the cosmos and the higher spiritual
realms influenced later conceptualizations of angels and demons.
Gnosticism propagated the idea that this world is the product of an
evil deity—the Demiurge—who traps human spirits in the prison of the
physical world. Our true home is the pleroma, the absolute spirit, to
which we should seek to return by rejecting this material world and
abstaining from the pleasures of the flesh. Unlike Christianity, in which
one is saved by faith, in this school of thought one was saved by proper
intellectual insight, or gnosis, which is secret knowledge imparted to
Gnostics. Gnosticism in the original sense died out before the Middle
Ages, but the term continued to be used to refer to any departure from
orthodoxy the Church judged to be too world-denying or that seemed
to stress mental insight over faith as the essential mode of salvation.
Two distinct types of entities are associated with Gnosticism:
aeons and archons. The aeons are the higher spiritual beings who reside in the pleroma. In one common schema—discussed by the anti-
Gnostic Church writer Irenaeus—there were thirty aeons, arranged in
fifteen pairs, from Depth and Silence to Theletos (Desire) and Sophia
(Wisdom). Sophia, the lowest aeon, desired to know Depth (in some
accounts, she desired to know herself). Her unfulfilled desire caused
her to give birth to another entity—often called Yaldabaoth—who
created our material world. This creation involved the emanation of
the seven levels of the classical cosmos. The archons are the rulers
who govern each of these levels and act as guardians preventing the
sparks of light (i.e., the divine essence of individual human beings)
from returning to the pleroma. Part of the knowledge imparted to the
Gnostics is information on how to bypass these archons.