Plato

“Demiurge” sounds like the name of a monster. In Greek it was an ordinary word for a craftsman, somebody who made things for the public, like a potter or a carpenter. Plato picked that humble word for the maker of the world, and he meant it kindly. Five or six centuries later, Gnostic teachers used the same word for a blind and jealous ruler who had trapped the soul in a body. They didn’t get the idea from nowhere. They had read Plato closely, and they kept almost everything he said except his opinion of the craftsman. That one change is the most useful key I know for reading Gnostic myth, so let’s follow it through Plato’s two most famous images. ...

I skipped saying 7 for years. Every time I read through the Gospel of Thomas, I’d hit the lion, shrug, and move on to the fisherman in saying 8, who at least made sense. It read like a riddle with a line missing, or a copying error somebody forgot to fix. It turns out the saying makes a lot of sense once you know what a lion meant to a reader in the second or third century. Two other texts help, one by Plato and one from the Gnostic library itself, and both were sitting in the same pile of books buried near Nag Hammadi. Read with them, Thomas 7 becomes one of the most practical sayings in the collection. ...

Plato’s Account of Atlantis The oldest mentions of Atlantis appear in Plato’s dialogues “Timaeus” and “Critias,” composed around 360 BCE. Plato depicted Atlantis as a powerful and advanced kingdom that existed about 9,000 years before his time, positioned beyond the “Pillars of Hercules.” He portrayed it as a sophisticated naval civilization that eventually sank into the ocean as divine punishment following its defeat by the Athenians. Scholars continue debating whether Plato intended this narrative as historical fact, philosophical metaphor, or mythological tale. ...