demiurge

Demiurge, oils on canvas, 50.5 x 40.5 cm. Below is what I wrote (in 500 characters or fewer) as part of my submission to the 2014 Clifton Art Prize. It's a bit pretentious but at least explains the title:

For Platonic and Pythagorean philosophers, the job of fashioning and maintaining the material World was subcontracted to a Demiurge, an artisan, a lesser god but still superhuman, under whose current dominion reality is fractured, unintegrated --- the Kosmos fragmented into a chaos of fractal dimensions, yielding only splintered shards of perplexity. The painting shows a disintegrated, disintegrating Multiverse in which quantum entanglement makes mockery of time and space.

In the Gnostic literature, Jehovah takes on the demiurge role, eg in the excerpt below from "On the Origin of the World", a Gnostic work dealing with creation and end times. The work "...rethinks the entire story of Genesis, and positions Yaldabaoth (the Demiurge) as the creator of the world, fulfilling the role of Jehovah/Yahweh in Genesis. Furthermore, the Serpent in the Garden of Eden is depicted as a hero sent by Sophia to guide mankind towards enlightenment."*

The creator god, the one who claimed in evolving orthodox dogma to have made man, and to own him, the god who would have man contingent upon him, born ex nihilo by his will, was a lying demon and not God at all. Gnostics called him by many deprecatory names: "Saklas", the fool; "Yaldebaoth", the blind god; and "Demiurge", the architect or lesser creative force.

Their chief is blind; because of his power and his ignorance and his arrogance he said, with his power, "It is I who am God; there is none apart from me." When he said this, he sinned against the entirety. And this speech got up to incorruptibility; then there was a voice that came forth from incorruptibility, saying, "You are mistaken, Samael" - which is, "god of the blind."

Since that day, there appeared the principle of verbal expression, which reached the gods and the angels and mankind. And what came into being as a result of verbal expression, the gods and the angels and mankind finished. Now as for the ruler Yaldabaoth, he is ignorant of the force of Pistis: he did not see her face, rather he saw in the water the likeness that spoke with him. And because of that voice, he called himself 'Yaldabaoth'. But 'Ariael' is what the perfect call him, for he was like a lion. Now when he had come to have authority over matter, Pistis Sophia withdrew up to her light.

Then when Pistis saw the impiety of the chief ruler, she was filled with anger. She was invisible. She said, "You are mistaken, Samael," (that is, "blind god"). "There is an immortal man of light who has been in existence before you, and who will appear among your modelled forms; he will trample you to scorn, just as potter's clay is pounded. And you will descend to your mother, the abyss, along with those that belong to you. For at the consummation of your (pl.) works, the entire defect that has become visible out of the truth will be abolished, and it will cease to be, and will be like what has never been." Saying this, Pistis revealed her likeness of her greatness in the waters. And so doing, she withdrew up to her light.

* from a document I stumbled upon online some years ago --- I'd like to provide a more detailed attribution but that's all I can remember, sorry.

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