God is, in fact, Anthropos, Man/Human, or rather the archetypal Androgyne, in whose breast take place cognitive, volitional processes that are a model and at the same time a reflection of structures of thought and modalities of action typical of the Gnostic. These processes are actualized mythologically in a series of hypostases and entities, which [59] Gnostics call ‘aeons’, and which represent self-subsisting moments in the dynamic expansion of divine reality. From a situation of initial stasis and immobility, which reveals a plenitude in some way unresolved, there is a sort of explosion, as a result of which the great machine of Gnostic theogony moves into action.
It has already been pointed out that Gnostic theogony, unlike other ancient theogonies, begins with an initial plenitude that ends in that ‘crisis’ (the sin of Sophia) that will attack the periphery of the Pleroma. In this downward movement, which takes place within the Pleroma, a single protagonist is actually concealed behind a multiplicity of personae, the masks assumed in the Gnostic drama: the pneuma, or divine spirit, a formal active dynamic element and at the same time a luminous, pure, uncontaminated substance. It is from this starting-point that various pairs of aeons emanate from the divine bosom in accordance with the divine plan to form that perfect number of entities into which the Pleroma is divided and whereby it is completed. This process of emanation, of the progressive issue of the divine substance, by means of which God manifests to himself the totality of his infinite potentialities, is a process of enrichment, but also of impoverishment. Indeed, only by the concrete manifestation of the complex articulation of his potential nature can God truly know himself. But, equally and contradictorily, this movement entails a flowing of divine substance, which disperses itself in the pleromatic space and, moving progressively away from its ideal centre, loses in stability, solidity, strength and vigour. And it is no accident that the Pleroma experiences, just at its outer periphery, in its final aeon (generally identified with Sophia), a crisis which threatens its unity and stability and which will be solved only by the elimination of the cause of this disturbance, i.e. with the expulsion of an actual part of spiritual matter as a sort of scapegoat. This will be placed in a region outside the Pleroma, where it will give rise to a successive phase in the process: the creation of the world and of human beings. Naturally, in turn, these successive processes will bring a further degradation of the spiritual element, now become a prisoner of the world of darkness and the human body. To recover and to save it, it will be necessary to send a Revealer, a Saviour, to gather the particles of light dispersed in the cosmos and to restore them, purified, to their home.
(GFHG)