The demiurge places himself at the center, committing that essential falsehood; for Gnostics this is due to his sin and his deception, and so he is despised and the absent God is worshiped- while for Hermaedion, the demiurge did so as a riddle-test of mortality posed to mankind, leading to the creation of the world as a proving ground for transcendence- to see if we could bear the BYTHS, the burning-heart of the Pandemaic posed against Ouranos and the respective affirmation of Identity and Being, for even the Gods/aeons could not bear it, and so were limited by it in their own immortal way.
The Ouranos asserted Sophia as the image of its Identity and the All, while the Pandemos, longing for change and for possibility, responded with the Bythos, which the demiurge later explored in his isolation from the other Aeons,- in that abyss within which he eventually met Sophia, as written elsewhere. The Gnostics conceive of absolute-identity, the True-God,- which because it is perfect is also self-enclosed: it does not "exist". To exist would mar it. But neither does the last digit of PI. But that inexistence actuates the existent digits of PI that we have bothered to calculate. That is the argument: a similar transcendental autonomy grounds consciousness itself in the inexistent, Sophianic-Ouranic deity. How much talk is there of existence, noble existence; and how little actually exists. They look on the world and saw a being that changes, and thus, something that is the work of an inferior entity, a demiurge. But my revision is an understanding of that inferior world, and change, as being intimately tied with the demiurge as not an inferior deity, but a riddle-making one, who offers the world as a path to transcendence, not above humanity, but above the divinities and their absolute identity, the Ouranic perfection of their eternities. In short: the Bythos, as the soul or response of Pandemos to Ouranos in the dramatic unfolding of the cosmogony from the theogony, is what enables the un-representable self-enclosed Identity of Ouranos' soul- Sophia, to become the empty center of the motive universe (and eventually, consciousness. Self-consciousness itself is rooted on a strange-loop, an aleph-null and should not exist- yet it does: that is knowledge beyond knowledge as well, which I use metaphors to indicate, as with the irrationality of PI or the marble and stone metaphor. That is what GNOSIS itself means, knowledge beyond knowledge, existence beyond the existent.) and the point of departure which fulfills Pandemos' desire for change, against Ouranos' desire for stasis, as well as the demiurge's hope for transcendence through his monkey-philosophers, humanity; BTHYS TOU ANAHAT KHYA-PANDEMAI. As to the distinction of Being and Non-Being: the major point of Hermaedion's Gnosticism is that the two are distinct but not opposites, and so cannot be dialectically synthesized in order to convert the one into the other and initiate the Babel-construction of the tower of positive knowledge from out of the negative. Neither Nietzsche or Heidegger could preserve the negative, it is a slippery matter I suppose; but the impossibility of self-consciousness owes itself to its grounding in the unresolvable negative, and the aleph-null at the heart of the paradox of meaning itself in the preservation of the negative as negative.
The conception of the un-representable god is certainly a paradox, for that is itself a representation; contradiction and lies however, are relative terms, as are all human terms. The unrepresentable representation has manifold formulations; ie. in Nagarjuna, in both Eriugena and Schelling, the stange-loops idea, Ophite Gnosticism, etc. The logic of it is supra-logical (paradoxical) and difficult to conceive, but necessary. It is not a total erasure but only an aleph-level paradox as I went over earlier, (as is the contradictory statement, this statement is a lie) for human language is susceptible to them. The un-representable center commands signification precisely because it does not signify anything. By not representing anything, it facilitates representation. The un-representable center enables representation, precisely because it cannot be represented: in the same way that nonbeing enables differentiation, the carving away and nonexistence of most of a marble stone that is required to bring out a specific form in it and create a statue, the nonbeing of bythos. It is false to place one's self at that center and in so doing, assert the Ego as the representation of it, of the absent divinity, denying bythos due to being unable to consciously bear the paradox of the un-representable as that which enables representation. Bearing the paradox means nothing is grounded in itself; the Bythos is the response of Pandemos to all Ouranic assertion of identity and ground, of whose number the EGO is certainly counted. A Being, an Identity, exists only because the Bythos allows it to exist; the Bythos as what is subtracted from the All-Being like marble to reveal a statue, which is of course contradictory, for if the All-Being can be subtracted from, it is not the All: if non-being exists, then the All-Being cannot be the All. But again, these are human paradoxes of an imperfect language, mere alephs, which at their most extreme can lead to aleph-null and the disintegration of the conscious mind itself, when consciousness reflects on the paradox of its own reflectivity, and the manner in which the Bythos as the inexistent permits its existence- the existence of the conscious self, as well. The Bythos is more a less a theological derivative of the metaphysics of the Loss of Being and Pure-Negation, Negation without conversion into Positive Knowledge through the dialectical interplay with presence. Consciousness is rooted in itself, but consciousness is nothing; therefor consciousness is rooted in everything; therefor everything is consciousness: therefor this everything, the All-Being as Parmenides names it, cannot contain its own representation- which is nothing and, as Nothing, the contradiction of the All, which is consciousness; therefor, etc. That is the extent of the paradoxical nature of the BYTHS, or the transcendental autonomy on which reflection is dependent, as written elsewhere. This is why the Bythos is necessary to bring forth out of the All, true existences. To understand it is one of the seven-fold paths of splendor, AGLAIA; one of the highest forms of magia, and a dispensation of the upayya, for it renders consciousness as the nonexistence subtracted from the All in order to produce Being and the motive germ of our reality,- the first whirlings of the void, a thought implied in the formula concluding the first Pentad.
Endopsychosis and Heuresis: This phrase draws on the Timaeus' treatment of motion and time as constitutive of a deeper intrapsychical (endopsychosis) connection between eternity and temporality, as the two equally represent the component souls of man, ie. the eternal intellective soul and its pre-existent unity of intelligibles, and the bios or phenomenal consciousness, which endeavors to continually reify its own heterogeneous extension in time (What Augustine calls the distentio animi) and infinitesimal multiplicity as the motive force driving our organism as an internally cohesive unity or heuresis of the ontos, as epitomized in the Parmenidean trance over the circular reciprocation of forces within the stabilization of the All-Being and the frozen circumflection of self-consciousness.
The matter of the aleph-null and the anti-dialectical preservation of the Negative is particularly difficult, though it must be admitted as equally important, and the main point at which I diverge from the line developed throuhout the canon that brought us to the limit of univocal metaphysics in Nietzsche and Heidegger. The aleph, because of what it actually is: negation without dialectical conversion into positive knowledge and identity, threatens to destabilize any system exposed to it, including consciousness itself: but it can also surcharge them, if wielded like the cosmogenic Fires of the proto-Zoroastrian sects. It is important to keep in mind that things like the non-terminating irrational numbers or the Bythos being the marble the artist must negate, that is, chisel away from the block of stone in order to enable change to occur and a distinct form- a statue, to emerge from it- are metaphors. It is not possible to speak of the paradox of language itself in- language, at least not in English, or in any pure formal logic either, as it is as much a paradox of reason itself as well. There is simply no logical system to resolve that paradox because it is the paradox of logic, meaning, consciousness and existence themselves. You can only encounter and survive it, or reject it by placing the Ego at the un-representable center as an act of rightfully blessed love, to try and hold the circle together- the crucifixion: but it is a doomed love, as all love is doomed, and will not last long before the webs spun by the spider close off every turn of reason and paralyze you, as Nietzsche was, as was everyone who took on the weight of the Pandemos without the Fire to keep the light in the BYTHS: BTHYS TOU ANAHAT KHYA-PANDEMAI. In some sense that is what the Will to Power is: if self-consciousness is included in the All-Being, it cannot be conscious of self: but if it is not included in the All-Being, then the All-Being is not the All. (This is not a logical paradox: it is the paradox of logic, of meaning itself, hence its category of aleph-null. You can't even speak of it in normal human language which is why Hermaedion has to shift to his crypto-magickal synchro-mystic Proto-Indo European derivative mid sentence occasionally, as it stands as our only remaining vestige of the hyper-language before Babel and the collapse of the Sumerian civilization.) Therefor meaning, for Nietzsche, is itself only phenomena, incapable of reaching beyond phenomena; therefor everything is phenomena, including the self proclaiming such a fact. Parmenides with his heuresis represents the opposite madness of proclaiming everything to be noumena.
I believe the Demiurge places himself at the center in order to become a martyr and example, so as to indicate how not to properly apotheosize ourselves- not because he truly coveted the perfection of the silent God, the Phanic-echo, Sophia, and thought he could claim her domain by doing so.
Hermaedion seems bent on the idea of not merely surviving the aleph, but using it to achieve a kind of apotheosis, a hyper-ousia or supra-existence; a profane enlightenment, god-thought beyond this "world", which is only a testing-ground to him, for this experiment toward apotheosis and transcendence; for moving beyond the relativity of human beings. Human beings are only doomed to the relative because their whole Babel-tower of reason is built on top of a repressed aleph; a paradox, the unthought and unthinkable: root that paradox and then you can step outside of the circle which is their relative perception and their world, and all worlds, which is the AEON: AEON TOU MAEDON HERMA. And from there, you can see the Babel-Tower itself, and stand outside of it. I admire the aim of the Gnostics to transcend humanity and the relativity to which man is confined in the uroboric configuration of Time ie. the will to power, however, like Hermaedion, I found their approach (based on contempt of the Demiurge; the wish to return to the silent god of Sophia and reject existence and the physis, the world) wrong-headed (A misunderstanding of the Demiurge as having erred in our creation as opposed to, in my reading: posed a riddle. In essence, they- the Gnostics, proclaim this world false because the demiurge made an inferior imitation of the perfection of the silent, self-enclosed, eternal non-creating God to which they long to return their souls so as to escape the prison of shadows and mortality: * I proclaim this world false because the Demiurge found a way to transcend the limitations imposed by the Aeons in service to that perfect God and so he made this world as a riddle and a demonstration of that new path toward the fulfillment of the promise of the BTHYS- you pass the riddle, you transcend, you fail, you ... This world itself is the Syren-Song, the Babel tower that cannot be erected without being ascended: it is the test for transcendence, to survive the erasure and mind-destroying effect of confronting the aleph, which either allows you to overcome mortal limitations or ...) It is sin to hold the dagger, but love to guide it; whatever is done with both hands is love.
Above all: the BYTHS is the soul of Pandemos, its first born, its initial response to Ouranos:
Emptiness, which made room for the possibility of change; CHANGE and POSSIBILITY, the riddle that so vexed the aeons and Ouranos, who of course profess perfection, eternity, identity in the face of the Negative. To fulfill the promise of the BYTHYS is the task of the New-Man; beyond the perfection and eternities of the Ouranic deities, the aeons, and Sophia herself- Ouranos' first-born or ennoea; above all, beyond the imagination of their humiliation and shame, inasmuch as the Gods possess imagination. (If they do at all, it is in their shame.) For all new Hopes are initiated in the mysteries of the Dawn; tested, broken and turned upon the tethys or seas ** of the primal Orphaeum, between Nyct and Hemeron, tendered by mortality, passing from shade to star and flowering aleph; for in a world in permanent motion, an endless glittering All-Being yet to be measured by linear-serpent and torn in two, AH and AM, it is not possible to destroy or kill a thing- to kill would be another word for "transform", and thus- the highest realization of love, (for it is sin and hubris to hold the dagger...) inasmuch as love aims to transform, encourage, and to nourish that which is loved,- nor is it possible to bring into existence and give birth to the new, satisfying Pandemos.
* The typical return of the soul to the pleroma and the invisible heaven of Sophia/Phanes to escape the Demiurge and this false/impermanent/fallen world, as is wished for by the Gnostics: it is important to note that this is actually them intentionally using the ALEPH to nullify self-consciousness. That self-nullification is what the "return" they teach actually is. Thus their works offer profound magia, as long as it is read as a manual about how to fail the mastering of the aleph and the realization of the riddle that Hermaedion reads in the working of the Demiurge upon physis.
** Tethys, Nyct, and Hemeron, meaning the Sea, the Night, and the Dawn, are three variables in the ancient sacred poem of the Orphic religion. "Initiation in the mysteries of the dawn" refers to AGR: "... all things worthy of being loved or cherished, having grown up in darkness and having been at last initiated in the mysteries of the dawn, can only be seen in those rare occasions when we too feel within us the trust in the pale morning light, and reach up with them into the new sun."
There is no error; no thought can be any more or less true than another. Neither error or verisimilitude: there is only comprehension, and the lack of it. A thought can be more or less comprehensive than another, but not any more or any less true: that is the ectypal homeros of the klea-andron and true Platonic EIDEIA, the aisethesis of the Socratic unity of Intelligbles as a multivocal (non-dialectical) model of philosophic truth. It was pride, yes; for the heart reaches further than the will, and wisdom reaches further than the heart: pride which sung the heart of the Gnostics into the void; pride which sung the lamentation of their mortality, and our own, into the world-negating Phanic-echoes of their distant God, the three reverberations of the theoacousmate; pride which sung contempt of this world and the others, sung beyond their existence, and beyond all existence- but also humility. One cannot be prideful about one thing, without being humble and subordinate when it comes to another. Otherwise it is not pride, but mania, which is not even a vice, and can never be taught to philosophize. As to the nature of that humility, it needs only to be said that it is the humility of comprehension, which is incomprehension; incomprehension before the sun-maidens of Truth and the golden priestesses of enlightenment, as captivated the all-comprehending gaze of a Parmenides or a Pythagoras over their All-Being and Number-Universes. For only by seeing into the depth of the negative, immanent to their own self-consciousness, did they see the height of the transcendent, upon which that consciousness existed in a state of onto-genetic transcendental dependency,- * dependency to what they called Sophos, that is, Sophia- the highest Aeon, who denied to all other gods any share of her perfection, especially when it came to YLDBTH, the demiurge and the first true master, having seen beyond her and the rest of the divinities.
* To cite the non-theological language and purely philosophic formalism and argumentation in the excerpts I noted, mostly taken from the Limit and the Liminal project. It should be recalled, that much of my theology and mysticism are based on the ideas of transcendental dependency (of self-consciousness on the transcendent object- an object which is Sophia/Sophos in this context, related to the aleph-null of consciousness and language spoken of in this thread. Gnosis or knowledge-beyond-existence would for another example only be the application of the notion of transcendental dependency to Gnostic theology, etc.) and autonomy; the "violence of perspective" mentioned on P. 22 and 26-27 of Eidos; the dependency of immanence and transcendence in Eriugena and Schelling in Mythos and Ontos; and, of course, Hermeticism, Section 2: On the Transcendental Subject, or The Question of God. (P. 48-66)
The role of the negative and its athetic or anti-dialectal preservation within ontogenesis, which is a major component of my overall metaphysics, is integral to the understanding of Hermaedion's gnosis, factoring in my integration of Schelling-Eriugena and Bataille-Scheler as well. Statements about gnosis or knowledge-beyond-existence are rooted on that idea of un-resolvable negation. A very dense but also relatively short formulation of it is here, from Eidos:
[ INCIPIT: Eidos, P. 36 to P. 39. ]
" (... a participation which the Areopagite calls methexis) the "os onta" [what really exists] shown through the luminous "deiknytai", [what might be] that is, the presence which does not convert absence and Loss into Identity, which is the presence of the divine." This is essentially what gnosis, formulated in relation to my metaphysics of negation, is, substituting Ouranos for os-onta and Bythos for deiknytai and Pandemos for absense/loss/negation. One must first bear this asynthetic negation while simultaneously grounding the self in transcendental-dependency so as to avoid obliteration by the aleph: that is the PRIMAL ORPHAEUM, the sacred initiation of the Greek Orphic mystics necessary for guiding the uroboros into its linear-serpent form,- mythic symbols representing the re-identification of the self with its over-soul; then the Eleusinian erotikos is necessary, to ground the motive universe in that new-man, that is, to initiate the daemonic palintrope between the lower and higher soul, the AH and AM that splits the void of the AH-HAM; then finally a further step is needed, to reach the epistrophe or inward-turn and cohere the heroic-mind or ethos out of the daemon, to stand beyond anthropos as a true answer to the heart of Pandemos, which is BTHYS, which is the longing for the New-Man and liberation from the strictures imposed by the Aeons, for which the Demiurge of course martyred himself by creating the physical world for us.
It must be noted that, for Basilideans and Valentians, our Earth is only another scaffold in the innumerable syzygies,- though a failed one; one that must only succeed in producing its own pairing like all the others in order to be restored, that is, in order to find salvation from the painful delusions of selfhood, desire, and love inspired by the demoniac Sophos and Yaldabaoth, by which man is naturally deceived into the temptations of the prison of mortality,- that mortality whose duplicity, contradiction and agonism he embodies most, of all the animals. It is simply another element of the pleroma. This is inferred, of course, from the mythos surrounding Sophia and her having refused, out of pride and self-love,to liberate and contribute her measure of divinity to the unfolding of the Godhead, thus bringing about the material world which has no syzygieic pairing in the supernal realm and therefor offers the perfect means of further entrapping the ennoea. This is a false enlightenment, accordinly championed by those Gnostics who wish to return, beyond what they take as an illusory and mere phenomenal subjectivity, their own inner light or measure of the ennoea to the Phanic residuum,- to the silent perfection of the Godhead's original pleroma, as conceived prior to the destabiilization Sophia introduced and YLDBTH took advantage of in order to create the mortal prison of the earth as a further means of entrapping the holy radiance on Sophia's behalf, etc. The Hermaedean view takes YLDBTH as having practiced the "divine infidelity" that humanity imitates, that is, a kind of holy selfishness necessary for superlimating the undifferentiated psychosomatic potentia prior to the sublimation of any one differentiated libidinal cathexis,- for it was necessary to deface and bring the created world a degree lower (the antidrome) in the stages of ontogenesis than that resonant to the higher divinity, in order to make it possible to transcend that divinity, given the fact that Ouranos and Pandemos cannot be dialectically reconciled, instead producing through their ascription, or logical inherence of the ontos, an endless series of ectypes within athesis, as opposed to a univocal reduction of the Absolute within synthesis.
The Ouranic entities are, beginning in Phanes himself, perfectly stabilized and eternal identities, born of the perfection of the Godhead, that is, of the purity of the ennoea itself; motionless, uncreated and uncreating aeonic hypostases of the Monon organized within the Godhead: they are, to speak more poetically, the voids between the spokes of the wheel, while Pandemaic entities, though unstable and potentially destructive, are capable of transformation, (and even death, though the death of a god is a rare occurrence) of changing and serving the archonic principalities in the governing, informing, and direction of material reality and its evolution within Time, and in this way, functioning as the erected spokes sustaining and energizing the continuous motion in which material reality is alone constituted. However, there is an Ouranic being that represents the identity of change itself, which Hermaedion invokes by the word-mandala BYTHYS, just as there is a Pandemaic entity that embodies the pure energetic potential of the idea of the unchanging, of stability and form, in this way rendering the dialectical system of Hegel inutile, for, concerning "those datums within the oppositorum which function as one another's thesis or "necessary Being," to use the Aristotelian term ...":
" Here, however, Being and Non-Being contain within themselves an element
of their corollary, not an internal instability: the inherent Being of Non-Being and the
inherent Non-Being of Being are expanded into four voices instead of one, and these
voices form the circular tetrapole ... "
-- Monon and Mone, Retrospective.
