Blessed Night, Family Of Light 😊

I Pray All Is Well With Everyone, Tonight…And Your Hearts And Minds Are Full Of Love, Joy, And Compassion…For All Your Brothers And Sisters In Spirit. And We All Have Every Reason In The World To Be Full Of Those Higher Qualities For Ourselves And Others – Regardless Of Circumstances And Appearances; For The Breath Of Life Is Within Us All – The Spirit Of The Living God – Our “Mighty I AM Presence”! Of Course, There Are A Myriad Of Reasons For Being Loving To Ourselves And Others – And They Need Not Be Listed; And Some Will Attempt To Justify Reasons Not To Be; But The Fact That THE SPIRIT OF THE ONE LIVING GOD Dwells Within Us All…And IS OUR LIFE STREAM…Is All The Reason We Need! Amen…

Give Thanks And Praises For Love And Life…

And Y’all Be Love…

“The Abraxas Deity, his titles, nature, and form already having been discussed, it remains now to give a sketch of his great Apostle and his doctrines. To begin with the earliest notice of them – Clemens Alexandrinus lived in the same city, and in the same century, with Basilides, the reputed founder of the Abraxas religion. During some years of that period they were contemporaries, and it is more than probable that Clemens was personally acquainted with Basilides – he, being a very remarkable personage of his times. On this account Clemens testimony to the character of the Basilidan doctrine deserves infinitely more reliance than the statements of the later Fathers; whilst at the same time he passes a more judicious, and also a more favourable judgment upon its nature.

He describes the system as consisting in a constant attention to the soul, and intercourse with the Deity considered as the fountain of universal Love. In his own words, “The Basilidan doctrine consists of two parts; the first part busies itself with divine things and considers what is the First Cause through which all, and without which nothing is made; of what constitution are the things that pervade, or include, each other, the forces which exist in Nature, and unto what they tend. The other part relates to things human, as to what is Man; what things be consistent or inconsistent with his Nature, what he has to do and to suffer. In this department Basilides includes Virtue and Vice; what is Good, what is Evil, and what is Indifferent.” In short, we are here reminded of a description of a Buddhist missionary.

The amiable but fanciful Clemens, whose own Christianity was no more than a graft upon the congenial stock of his original Platonism, could see very little to blame in the transcendental speculations of Basilides. In his eyes the latter was not a heretic, that is, an innovator upon the accepted doctrines of the Catholic Church, but only a theosophic speculator who sought to express old truths by new formulæ, and perhaps to combine the same with the new faith, the divine authority of which he was able to admit without renouncing his own creed – precisely as is the case with the learned Hindus of our own day.

But far different is the picture of Basilides, as drawn by the pen of bigoted orthodoxy in the two next centuries, after his doctrines had been taken up and carried out to monstrous precision by the swarms of semi-Christian sects that sprung up in the very bosom of the Church. These notices are subjoined in chronological order, for they give in a few words the grand features of the perfected system. Hippolytus has left an excellent analysis of the Basilidan doctrine, well deserving of careful study, although it is hard to see how it bears out the assertion at the opening, that this heretic took his entire system ready made from Aristotle, with his genus, species and individual, but pretended to have received the same from St. Matthew, who had communicated to him the esoteric doctrines which he alone had received from Christ when on earth.

The philosophic Bishop, however, is mild in censure; nay, seems rather captivated by the ingenuity of the Alexandrine mystic. But Tertullian, with no sense of the beauty of a clever piece of sophistry, launches out like a true African barrister: “After this, Basilides the heretic broke loose. He asserted that there was a Supreme God named Abraxas, by whom was created Mind whom the Greeks call Nous. From Mind proceeded the Word, from the Word, Providence; from Providence, Virtue, and Wisdom; from these two again, Virtues, Principalities and Powers were made; from these infinite productions and emissions of Angels. By these Angels, the 365 heavens were created. Amongst the lowest Angels, indeed, and those who made this world, he sets last of all the god of the Jews, whom he denies to be God, affirming that he is one of the Angels.”

…The Basilidan doctrine of “Emanation” was greatly refined upon by Valentinus, whose muster-roll of the celestial hierarchy shall be given in its proper place. Suffice it here to observe that the entire theory resembles the Brahminical; for in that theogony each Manifestation of the One Supreme Being, regarded by the vulgar as a separate self-existing deity, has a female partner the exact counterpart of himself, through whom, as through an instrument, he exerts his power – to express which doctrine this other half is styled his Durga, “Active Virtue.” This last name, “Virtue”, actually figures in all the Gnostic lists of Emanations; and the great Æon, Pistis-Sophia, in her second “Confession” perpetually upbraids herself for having quitted her male partner, in her proper habitation, to go in quest of the Supernal Light: whilst she equally reproaches him for not descending into Chaos to her aid. The system of Dualism, in fact, pervades the whole of that wondrous revelation.

Brahminical inspiration is possible in many other points of the doctrine of Basilides, as will appear by the following extracts from Irenæus: …Being converted to Christianity he attempted, like many others, to combine his new faith with his old, for the explanation of things both spiritual and natural. To do this he invented a terminology and symbolism of his own. In the promulgation of his peculiar notions concerning God and the Divine attributes – the Word, the Creation, the Emanation of spirits and worlds, the Architect of the universe, and the multifarious forces of Nature – he took the same road with his contemporary Saturninus in Syria. His system was a combination of Christian, Jewish, Persian, and Egyptian notions, but the entire coin-position was molded by the spirit of the Oriental Gnosis.

…The doctrines he thus disseminated, his contemporary Irenæus represents in the following manner: “Basilides in order to invent something more refined and plausible in the Gnostic speculative philosophy pushed his investigations even into the Infinite. He asserted that God, the uncreated eternal Father, first brought forth Nous or Mind; and Mind, the Logos, Word; this in turn, Phronesis, Intelligence; whence came forth Sophia, Wisdom, and Dynamis, Strength.”

Irenæus understands Basilides as making a Quinternion of Beings or Personal Intelligences external to the Godhead: but Bellermann with more reason takes them as signifying personified attributes of the Supreme forms of his working internally and externally. According to this explanation Basilides would only have borrowed his system from the Kabbala; it is however equally likely that he drew the whole from a much more distant source, and that his “Untreated” and “Quinternion” stand in truth for the First Buddha and the successive Five.

“When the uncreated eternal Father beheld the corruption of mankind, he sent his Firstborn, Nous, into the world in the form of Christ, for the redeeming of all that believe in him out of the power of those who fabricated the world – namely, the Demiurgus and his Six sons, the planetary Genii. Nous appeared amongst men as the Man Jesus, and wrought miracles. This Christ did not die in person, but Simon the Cyrenian, to whom he lent his bodily form, suffered in his stead; inasmuch as the Divine Power, the Nous of the Eternal Father, is not corporeal, and therefore cannot die. Whoso, therefore, maintains that Christ has died is still the bondman of Ignorance, but whoso denies the same, he is a freeman, and hath understood the purpose of the Father.”

The Gnostics and Their Remains, by Charles William King, 1887