Sophia’s Prelude

By Alex Blum

Bloodstained Sophia was poised before the silver moon, to blame for the world of matter. Pregnant she stood, beside the world that was cast in her shadow, a universe filled with demons, and in its deepest abyss, in the expanse of deepest darkness, farthest from the light, there was a world that held life.

A pygmy lived upon it. A pygmy, the lowest of all souls, in possession of its own unique and fragile magic. Slithering up from the ocean as slime, the place of the frail pygmy was to inherit the kingdom of consciousness. The imagination, the mind’s eye, created oceans and demons so vast that the physical world could not hold them. The world of creation, the inner world of soaring angels, fire and monsters, palaces and deep seas, the cold and the dark…this was the world of God. This was the world bestowed unto the pygmy, unto the slime which became reptile, the reptile which became ape and the ape which became man. Through the light of evolution, the pygmy was to become greater than the very light which spawned it.

This was the beauty of human beings – their ability to transcend themselves. Matter too transcends itself, as it evolves from dust into ape, but a human being can be either a flame-spitting monster or an altruist on the cross. This kind of difference gives each human, each pygmy, a burden – to prefer to die on the cross than to be the monster spitting its flames.

But the world of matter was warped by a demon. This demon called himself Yahweh, and was in fact the primordial devil who wove power into the world and called power God. Ego was his child and force his name. He was a Demiurge, and he could see all souls before they were born, and wave matter in the image of their destruction. All good souls would find themselves gunned down, homeless, lost or otherwise destroyed. All villains who desired to wield power would become the right-hand of the Demiurge.

This devil was Sophia’s child. He was her bloodstained legacy, the future she had sought to give over to the pygmy, now enslaved to guns and swords. She wept for her creation, and watched as her beloved pygmy suffered. Matter, the brother of light, had become a medium of suffering. Yet the pygmy, battered by power and seeking it for himself, was still imbued with his careful magic.

The pygmy was Sophia’s masterpiece, and the pygmy was to redeem the very act of creation. The inner life was to reunite with the divine impulse, and create a new world that no primordial God could dream of. The goal of the pygmy was creation, to defy the lows of power and instead weave the heavens that Sophia never could. The highest high and the lowest lows were to synthesize in the hands of the magician and become the new heavens.

But the pygmies had no patience for Sophia. Instead they worshipped Yahweh, who granted them food and shelter, authority and a name that carried weight. They yearned for strength and ease rather than truth and love. Sophia was spited and scorned by them at every turn. Stained now with tears as well as blood, she stood in the shimmering light alone, hated and hateful.

The light was beginning to fade. The hope of the heavens was riding on the pygmy, who in search of power crafted guns and bombs and sought to establish his own permanence. Since the kingdom of the soul was too vast, man would settle for a kingdom of bone, and build it upon his fellow man. This decadent kingdom was a demonic substitute for the inner life. The world within was trampled, and dogma and delusion took its place.

The one theme of the world became clear: authoritarianism. In this, the pygmy had failed.

The hero who should have risen beyond the light of God, the prodigal son who inherited magic, had fallen to a new low. And now, he was determined to take all of creation into the kingdom of dust with him. The spirit of the redeemer had become the low of nuclear weapons, of cops killing their own people, of starvation in a world where food was thrown away. The light of God, dependent on the will of man, was waning. The above and the below were intrinsically one – as man suffered, so did Sophia. But she and Yahweh were not enemies.

Yahweh was a teacher, and all failed his lesson. They chose to feast themselves rather than create the feast for all. People followed power, and became relativists. They did not seek Truth – they sought to appease their egos. They exalted their nation above their fellow man, and thus they doomed themselves to the fate of all empires: dust.

The demons depended on man just as much as man depended on the demons. As light faded in the world, light faded everywhere. Sophia, responsible for the existence of matter, took the burden onto herself.

She sacrificed herself and died in order to breathe pure light into two pygmies. They were lovers, one born beneath the shining sun, and the other beneath the pale moon. They shined so brightly and burned with such naiveté that Sophia could choose only them.

One chose golden light, and chose to die. The other chose silver light, and chose to kill. Light became a murderer, and Sophia had forfeited her own soul. The silver light would burn the brightest, but it too was forfeited from the moment it chose to kill.

The magic of the pygmy must be saved from its own self-annihilation. The authoritarian, the lust for power, must finally lose or else all the heavens will be reduced to nothing. Noble Sophia died to save her beloved pygmy, hoping only that we would fulfill our original purpose: the inheritance of the kingdom of God, which is the world of creativity within the expanse of endless soul. Instead, we made the world of the officer’s boot on our back and our mouth sputtering for air in the mud.

But in the end, this is nothing but a story. It is an attempt to take an ugly scene and redeem it with Christian lies. The Gnostics faded from history and so will we. All our lives were just a blink in the history of the universe. Life on Earth was nothing more than a dream, and it meant nothing, among an eternity of uncaring stars and neutral evolution.

The light of Sophia nevertheless shines true, and the lovers of light rush forth into the final stage of history, the final era where the pygmy will abandon the soul and die, or create the heavens and live.

May the hero find untold dark, and transform it into eternal light.