If you’ve read about Gnosticism, you are familiar with Sophia, the essence of Wisdom. Some have equated Sophia with the more orthodox “bearer of light,” but this may be an over-simplification. My art poses a split personality theory when it comes to nailing each aeon (or deity) down to its own role.
As the main character of the Temples series, Sophia’s central act is the creation of the demiurge. Sophia deviates from the proper course of reproduction, mimicking the original creative act. The first principle, Atum performed a type of self-division like a single-cellular organism would do, spawning his own consort. With the existence of mates, this original method of reproduction had been obsoleted, but Wisdom has to know. She learns by experience. Without her consort, Afterthought (~Epimetheus), Sophia (~Prometheus) proceeds to engender a being purely out of her own essence. The results came as a shock. *
Wisdom is wonderful, but at what cost? Every positive contains its own equally harsh negative. Everything tainted, regrets take on a life of their own. The solution is obvious — split. Sophia always knew what she needed to do. She rejects all humiliating carnal experience as she gives birth to the demiurge, Ialdaboath. The artist creates herself as she creates her art.
The moment a child is born, the mother is also born. She never existed before. The woman existed, but the mother, never. A mother is something absolutely new. And so in you the child your mother lives on and through your family continues to live… so at this time look after yourself and your family as you would your mother for through you all she will truly never die. — Osho
Self-conflict personified, the demiurge (Ialdabaoth) splits in two just as Sophia had — the reactive mind at work, multiplying engram chains. Carnal existence takes great pride in itself and calls himself Satan. Once again shame is outcast, and a new world is born. By her children, we may know Sophia. Minus her trauma, Sophia becomes as Lucifer. Lucifer’s only fault is her reputation: the deadbeat mom who left her child to its own devices. But what is to be must be. The self evolves as its personalities multiply. We are all cells in one large body.
The Sophia/Lucifer identity conundrum is analogous to the universal phenomenon of the black hole. As the lowest aeon and creator of the creature, Wisdom represents the pathway to and from the mystical realms of the creative mind. From outside, the black hole appears to be an energy sucking gravity well leading to oblivion, but also a sun of suns that makes the galaxy go around. In the hole, the abstract concept of the singularity is connected to the spiritual source of all things, a place where all is one. Each organism, each form of life is a universe in itself, like a microcosmic part of a larger universe, containing the essence of the entirety.
Lucifer represents a fundamental characteristic of each consciousness which is demonized by the mundane mind, too terrified to experience the esoteric. Like Lucifer, artists and creatives are often revered on one hand while simultaneously ridiculed on the other — by those who are ruled by the reactive mind, the lower faculty that responds irrationally based upon natural, earthly prejudice and materialistic desire. Prejudice caused by the painful and traumatic experience of living in the world of the flesh warps our judgement if we allow it to. Rooted in the inferiority complex that the mundane world thrives on, the lowest realms of the universal mind condemn the highest realms — actually believing their twisted, ignorant judgements to be superior. This is the reactive mind, the demiurge at work. This is the reason why prophets have always been lambs for the slaughter, artists and philosophers censured, and Gods feared. The holy, holistic father forgives them however, for they know not what they do.
* See also the myth of Juno reproducing without her consort, Jupiter, in creating the ugly god – Vulcan.