The Serpent's Wisdom

I have been re-reading Elaine Pagels' book Adam, Eve, and the Serpent, and this stood out to me:

Justin, like many Jews and many of his fellow [contemporary] Christians, tended to interpret the difficulties of human life less in terms of the fall of Adam and Eve (Genesis 2-3) than in terms of the fall of the angels (Genesis 6:1-4). According to Genesis 6, the great and famous men of ancient times -- those called giants -- were the result of a hybrid union between God's angels and human women:

The sons of God [angels] saw that the daughters of men were fair; and they took to wife such of them as they chose... There were giants on the earth in those days... when the sons of God came in to the daughters of men, and they bore children to them, the mighty men of renown. (Genesis 6:2-4)

Justin explained that some of the angels whom God had entrusted to administer the universe betrayed their trust by seducing women and corrupting boys (so Justin amplified the story of Genesis 6), they "begot children, who are called demons."

... The majority of humankind fell under their power, and only an exceptional few, like Socrates and Jesus, escaped demonically induced mental slavery. This invisible network of supernatural energies proceeded, then, to promote the fortunes of their henchmen. "Taking as their ally the desire for evil in everyone," Justin explained, the demons became the patrons of powerful and ruthless men, and "instituted private and public rites in honor of those who are most powerful."

Justin saw the result at every turn -- above all in the vast panoply of imperial propaganda, which claimed for the Roman emperors and their governors, magistrates, and armies the power and protection of the gods. The injustice that dominated the law courts indisputably proved, according to Justin, that they were controlled by demons, who manipulated the judges to destroy anyone, from Socrates to Jesus to the present-day Christians [sic], who opposed the demons or threatened to expose them....

As I was reading this, it struck me that Justin's interpretation of the Pagan gods as demons, related to fallen angels, is strongly reminiscent of the Gnostic account of the Archons. Compare the above, for example, to this, from the Hypostasis of the Archons:

Then the authorities came up to their Adam. And when they saw his female counterpart speaking with him, they became agitated with great agitation; and they became enamored of her. They said to one another, "Come, let us sow our seed in her," and they pursued her. And she laughed at them for their witlessness and their blindness; and in their clutches she became a tree, and left before them her shadowy reflection resembling herself; and they defiled it foully. - And they defiled the stamp of her voice, so that by the form they had modeled, together with their (own) image, they made themselves liable to condemnation.

Later in the account we see that Cain, the firstborn to Eve, is the descendant of the Archons. So, structurally, the myth is different from the Genesis account in its details. However, the Gnostics understood their version of the myth as related to the existence of human evildoers.

They also understood the Archons as "rulers of this world" in a sense that is very similar to Justin's description of the Pagan gods and the imperial authorities associated with them: Gnosticism and Christianity both represented, at this stage, a radical revolt against the imperial order in every way -- in religious, political, economic, and cultural terms.

crossposted to my journal and crossposted to gnosticism