DeConick A.D

204
HELL WALKS AND STAR TREKS
transcendent realm the spirit first has to be awakened from unconsciousness,
and then it must travel through the hostile realms of the underworld,
where it overpowers the dark lords of Hades.
Second, the person has to fully grasp that his or her spirit originates
from the transcendent realm. With this realization, the spirit is perfected.
The Peratics saw this as a fulling or bleaching process, in which the spotty
or stippled spirit is whitened and cleansed of its impurities. Its true nature
has to be rescued from corruption, a corruption that has kept it ignorant
of its divinity. As the human spirit is perfected, it must ascend through the
harrowing celestial spheres and overpower the destructive gods who have
stationed themselves as rulers of the planets and stars.
We learn about these early second-century Gnostics from Hippolytus,
who was writing in Rome at the beginning of the third century (Hippolytus,
Refutation 5.12.1–17.13). According to his description, the Peratics
envisioned ultimate reality as a fountain spewing forth or emanating three
streams of existence. One stream is transcendent being, which they call
the Perfect Good, the Great Father, and the Unbegotten. The second is
divinity, which they understand to be the Good as it generates itself and
manifests itself as divinities or gods. The third stream of existence is everything
that is created, which is also good.
Each of these streams represents superjacent worlds or levels of reality.
The Peratics believe that the first level of reality, the unbegotten Good,
has flowed into the second level of reality, the self-generating Good. The
flow continues into the third level of reality, the material cosmos and humanity,
leaving humans filled with spirits, or what the Peratics call “seeds
of divine potential.”
But all did not remain good. The Peratics believe that there was a primordial
insurrection, when some of the good divinities who controlled
the created universe revolted and became evil. Who were these rulers? In
the ancient mind, the planets and constellations are the traditional gods
and heroes. Zeus, for instance, is the planet Jupiter, and Kronos is Saturn.
The constellations are legendary heroes like Hercules and Perseus. The
realms of the underworld are the territories of Hades and Persephone.
The Peratics identified these traditional divinities with the revolutionary
dark lords.
Here we find ourselves in a complicated religious buffer, where popular
astrological lore is blended with elements from legends about the mon-