Homily about the archons

(the following is my personal opinion)

The archons are "demons" ruling this "evil" or entropic universe of death according to Gnostic mythology. They are either regarded as fallen angels or creations by the soulless demiurge (Yaldabaoth, Sammael etc.). There is a general confusion about those archons, sometimes they are represented as real evil forces that persecute us and create troubles for us in our lifes, like a giant conspiracy. This is not a proper understanding of the archons. The point is this: 'Gnosis' is associated with knowledge about how to overcome negative passions, and conspiracy theories of a demonic persecution are negative passions, i.e. exactly the trap that Gnosticism warns us against! A Gnostic that have experienced real 'Gnosis' have experienced an inner calmness that makes 'Error' go away. 'Error' is a kind of colored world view filled with passions of one's own self-import and the evil of the world around oneself. That's the paradox of Gnosticism: it informs us that the universe is in a sense evil, while understanding the world makes the evil go away in ourselves, by a detachment from (negative) passions and dedication to knowledge. And by knowledge I mean knowledge, not "knowledge". 'Gnosis' is experiential knowledge, so a part of mastering the All is ... experiential knowledge about the All. Where the All includes the universe. A starkly vivid example of a passion-ridden person from history is Adolf Hitler: everything in his world was circulating around his own self-import: he was "the savior of the German people" leading it to "greatness", and everything around him was "enemies" or tools of the "German folk spirit". He was extreme, but the pattern of self-import and black and white world view of narcissist persons are clear signs that they are archon-ridden and trapped into matter. Cults are like that too, and therefore if a movement is a cult, it is by definition not Gnostic, but if it is Gnostic it is not a cult. By definition.

Now, what's the reason this universe is "evil" and to what degree? My personal opinion is that there are five qualitative degrees of "evil":

1. entropy: all energy spreads in the energy spectrum, and in the whole all structure disappear, (if I got the definition from Boltzmann right),
2. death follows from entropy as applied on living bodies, life is when the entropy is kept low, and there are just a few energy levels kept up by certain chemical biocatalytic reactions in clusters of cells,
3. predation is when an organism to survive kills another organism and absorbs its nutritional contents, just to keep itself alive, predation could be directed against you individually, but only as a nonpersonal need for the other's survival,
4. persecution is when a human recognizes you individually for what you are, and tries to make your life sour and perhaps kill you,
5. cults are groups of evil people that keeps an archon-ridden world view, and persecutes everybody that threatens the integrity of the cult, as well as any internal dissenter.