Archons

Open your phone and count the decisions you did not make. The order of the feed, the next video queued, the moment the notification arrived, the face at the top of your timeline. Every one of those choices was made for you, by systems optimizing for something that is not your flourishing. The Gnostics had a word for unseen powers that arrange human experience from behind the curtain. We have covered who the archons are in an earlier post. This one is about the machinery that has, in our lifetime, taken over their job description. ...

The Gnostic texts describe a class of beings called archons. The word comes from Greek, meaning “rulers” or “authorities.” They’re the powers that govern the material world under the direction of the Demiurge. This might sound like ancient mythology irrelevant to modern life. But the archons describe something you experience every day. Who Are the Archons? According to texts like the Apocryphon of John and the Hypostasis of the Archons, the archons were created by the Demiurge to help administer the material cosmos. They’re associated with the seven classical planets, each governing a sphere through which the soul descends at birth and must ascend at death. ...