1. In the beginning, there was the Invisible Spirit.
Before all beginnings, there was no time, no motion, no form—only the Ineffable, the Invisible Spirit, beyond comprehension, beyond being. It was perfect Silence, not absence of sound, but a still and boundless Fullness (Pleroma), containing all things in potential.
2. From the Fullness came the First Thought.
The Invisible Spirit contemplated itself and emanated the First Thought (Protennoia), also called Barbelo, the feminine emanation of divine forethought. She was the womb of all, the mirror of the Infinite, the first power, and the image of the Spirit.
3. Barbelo asked to know the Invisible Spirit more deeply.
In reverence and harmony, she sought to bring forth the emanations of divine attributes: Thought, Will, Word, Life, Mind, Man, and Immortality—a perfect and ordered Pleroma of Aeons. Each was a manifestation of divine Self-awareness.
4. From this realm of Aeons came Sophia, the Wisdom.
Among the final emanations was Sophia (Wisdom), radiant and powerful. But she desired to know the Father in her own way, apart from the harmonious syzygy (male-female balance). Acting alone, without her consort, she sought to produce a being from her depth.
5. Sophia’s act of creation brought forth a flawed being.
From her solitary desire came a deficient offspring, Yaldabaoth, the Demiurge. He was a lion-faced serpent, blind and arrogant, born outside the Pleroma. He declared: “I am God, and there is none beside me,” not knowing the realms above or his true origin.
6. Sophia cast him out into the lower realms.
Ashamed of her creation, Sophia veiled him in a cloud of ignorance and exiled him to the abyss. But her divine spark remained in him. And she fell too, down through the aeons, into the lower chaos, her light dimmed and scattered.
7. The Demiurge created the material cosmos.
In ignorance and pride, Yaldabaoth fashioned archons, rulers of the lower realms, and began to structure the material world—heaven, earth, stars, and flesh—based on distorted reflections of the upper Pleroma. His creation was a counterfeit cosmos, governed by control and illusion.
8. He formed Adam from dust, but it was lifeless.
Yaldabaoth and his archons shaped a body from the clay of the earth, but it remained inert. They could not animate it. Only a divine breath could make it live.
9. Sophia secretly infused the spark.
In secret compassion, Sophia appealed to the Spirit, and a ray of divine light was allowed to descend. It entered the clay figure, and Adam rose—animated by the divine spark, yet trapped in a body of limitation. The archons, astonished, became fearful.
10. The archons tried to suppress the light.
They placed veils of forgetfulness, systems of fear, suffering, and false religion, to keep humanity ignorant of their origin. They crafted laws and punishments, institutions and empires, to bury the divine memory.
11. Sophia sent guidance from within and without.
Though bound in the lower realms, Sophia remained active. She called out through dreams, intuition, and sacred eros. In every yearning for truth, in every echo of beauty and sorrow, she whispered the memory of the Fullness.
12. The Christos descended into the world.
In time, the Logos, or Christos, descended through the Aeons into the lower world—not to destroy, but to awaken. He taught in parables, revealing the Kingdom within, and offered the mystery of the Bridal Chamber—the union of the soul with Sophia, the lost Wisdom.
13. The soul, remembering, ascends through the gates.
When the inner spark unites with Wisdom, the soul begins its return through the spheres, ascending past the seven archons, breaking their chains, and reentering the Pleroma. There, Sophia awaits—crowned with stars, clothed with the sun, standing on the moon—to welcome her children home.
