| “ | Yaldabaoth has only one single purpose: feeding. Blind but driven solely by instinct alone. His followers see him as a destroyer and incidental creator, "feeding" upon gods, worlds, and stars, while "exhaling life" into the cosmos. To the Sarkites life is just a natural byproduct of the Old God's existence; unguided by intelligence and spreading through a process not entirely dissimilar from panspermia. | „ |
| ~ Michael |
Yaldabaoth, also known as the Demiurge or the Wyrm, is a voracious and malefic primordial being of chaos and darkness. While many confuse the Demiurge with an "evil God" stereotype, it is actually a figure below that of the Supreme Being, thus in many ways is a paradoxical deity that lords over the physical plane of existence but is below that of the spiritual realm.
Description[]
Yaldabaoth, made up of the negative aspects of the Lord, became envious of God's way of creation and thus decided to create its own version of the universe and its own angels. In Gnosticism, particularly Valentinianism, Yaldabaoth is viewed to be the Evil God portrayed in the Old Testament. He is an entity unable to perceive other expressions of the divine, leading him to believe he is the supreme deity of the universe. As God had created the Seven Archangels, Yaldabaoth created the seven archons. In ancient times, the making of the world is ascribed to a company of seven archons, whose names are given, but their chief, known as Yaldabaoth comes into still greater prominence.
Yaldabaoth has already sunk from his high estate and resides in the false Heaven, where, with his forty-nine demons, he tortures wicked souls in boiling rivers of pitch, and with other punishments. He is an Archon with the face of a lion, half flame and half darkness. Yaldabaoth also possesses an epithet known as "the God-Eater", which is true to the meaning behind it. Yaldabaoth is said to be the being whom will devour the gods. They must reach the end in order to be reincarnated into their mortal forms. However, Yaldabaoth will give chase to the fearful gods and devour them, thus completely ensuring that they will not cross into the other world and prevent their reincarnation.
History[]
Genesis[]
Yaldabaoth was the child of the Aeon Sophia. Sophia came across a lone spark that dwelled within the waters of chaos, lifelessly attempting to breach its surface but to no avail. Sophia took the spark and wrapped the petals from where she blossomed around it. However, even with the Tree of Life's power, she sensed that it could not develop properly and sought a solution for this dilemma. She bathed the petal wrappings in the waters of the Collective Unconscious, mixed it with the Secret Fire, then planted it in the Pleroma gardens, resulting in the birth of none other than Yaldabaoth himself. As benevolent as her actions may seem, it caused instability to the Pleroma. The reason why Sophia even resorted to such a course of action is because she desired to create something apart from the divine totality, without the receipt of divine ascent.
In this act of separate creation, she gave birth to the monstrous Demiurge and, being ashamed of her deed, wrapped him in a cloud and created a throne for him within it. The Demiurge, isolated, did not behold his mother, nor anyone else, and concluded that only he existed, ignorant of the superior levels of reality. With this mind, he created the physical realm along with his own Heaven with his Archons to serve his every whim. The Demiurge, having received a portion of power from his mother, sets about a work of creation in unconscious imitation of the superior Pleromatic realm. He is blind to all that is spiritual, but he is king over the other two provinces.
Thus Sophia's power becomes enclosed within the material forms of humanity, themselves entrapped within the material universe: the goal of Gnostic movements was typically the awakening of this spark, which permitted a return by the subject to the superior, non-material realities which were its primal source.
Workings of Flesh[]
Yaldabaoth is said to be blind in the sense that he cannot see the spiritual beauty of creation because of his isolation from creation itself as well as having his own personal kingdom become his own personal prison. As such, he believes that creation should be beholden in all its glory through physicality rather than metaphysicality. It must come in its totality by flesh, divinity radiating from the mortal flesh that binds it in darkness. This, however, did not exactly sit well with Mekhane, one of the Sentinels of Creatio who guards the Tree of Life and Asherah. Mekhane believes that one would exert their own inner divinity and knowledge through tools and machinery, having the knowledge to build machines that can create wonders from creation. Yaldabaoth, on the other hand, only sees that divinity can come from oneself, to have all your limits removed and become a "higher-being" through your own flesh.
This sparked a fierce antagony between Mekhane and Yaldabaoth, especially since the latter would outright destroy her own creations in an attempt to nullify her claims of machinery and tools leading to mankind's ascension and establishment as lords over their kingdoms. In an attempt to create order from the perceived chaos of the cosmos, Yaldabaoth chained the soul and heart in mortal forms and punishes those who refuse to adhere to his rule. The first phase of his mission was to murder Albion, the Aeon of Primordial Man, whose death created a division that resulted in the Four Zoas. However, this only led to monstrosities that could not contain their own physical spirits and possess a single one-track mind, which is to follow Yaldabaoth and thus have no free will of his own.
Sarkicism[]
Because of this, Mekhane engaged in battle against the Demiurge, during which a piece of the Demiurge's body was cut off and flung far across the Plemora and entering the universe. It broke off into several pieces, with one in particular making its way to Earth, reaching it, and its collision resulted in the extinction of the dinosaurs. This particular piece of Yaldabaoth was what actually led to the creation of the ultraterrestrial parasitic fungus only known as the Mold, which was discovered in 1200 BCE. This is where Sarkicism would fully be established for the first time in human history and in turn became devoted followers of the Demiurge. The Demiurge fled from Mekhane and laid hidden during the Scarlet King's omnicidal rampage against all of creation where he also witnessed the Scarlet King destroying Mekhane in a vain attempt to stop the mad Sentinel. This gave Yaldabaoth the opportunity to continue with his plans unhindered, especially after the Scarlet King's own defeat by the Seven Archangels.
Fortunately, what remained of Mekhane's body after her defeat at the hands of the Scarlet King was still sentient enough to sense Yaldabaoth's activities and were then used by his own rebellious son Sabaoth to cage Yaldabaoth, using her body as a prison for the Demiurge. Defeated and imprisoned by Sabaoth, Yaldabaoth fell into a dormant sleep from exerting too much power to fight his son and losing many pieces of himself during the ensuing battle. However, several of these pieces would find their way towards Earth, leading to the creation of the Mold and Sarkicism. His Archons also remained active and under the request of their lord would guide the Sarkites on Earth, preparing for the imminent arrival of their master.
Personality[]
While he fancies himself a creator deity, he really creates nothing; instead, he copies from "archetypal" patterns in the Pleroma. The planetary stereoma of his making is like a plastic copy of an abalone shell. Only someone who does not know the reality of the abalone shell, and what living miracle of nature is required to produce it, would accept the plastic substitution. When God knew of his crimes, He cast His "dark half" into the lower depths of Creation; the lower depths being the "dead zone" of the universe where there is virtually no life thriving on any planet whatsoever.
There is a legend in which Yaldabaoth was so filled with envy that even he tries to limit man's knowledge by forbidding him the fruit of knowledge in Heaven. At the consummation of all things all light will return to the Pleroma. But when Mekhane knew of this, she cast her "dark half" into the lower depths, where the Demiurge spends the rest of its days in a lake of boiling pitch, forever slithering through the black sludge as it greedily devours the contents within that represents the very things that it desired to have and make but never had the opportunity to do so.
Being imprisoned and alone, Yaldabaoth's sanity deteriorated with every passing point in time. And soon, it came to the point where it devoured one of the planets that resided in the Dead Zone of the universe. Upon experiencing the taste of creation, the Demiurge came to a conclusion: that if would be denied its right to create, then it would only have to destroy. The Demiurge began its quest by literally devouring any and all type of matter, or to it, anything that had God's power lingering from it. Having deciding that it would instead take away God's creation just as He did with it.
