DeConick A.D

322
PLEASANTVILLE RELIGIONS
Father, the creation of the sixty realms of light, and the revelation of Jeu’s
mysteries. In the end, the congregation asks the Father, the unapproachable
God, what he wishes them to do next, seeking guidance and ongoing
revelation.
These liturgies were meant to give peace to the living by providing
them with exact knowledge of the way to immortality and a stellar afterlife.
This group had transposed well-known aspects of Egyptian mortuary
rituals into a new communal initiatory context, which made their writings
Gnostic liturgies of the dead for the living.
Transposing the Stars
The later books in the Jeuian collection, starting with the second book
of Jeu and including all four books of Pistis Sophia, show a gradual shift
in perceptions of God and the cosmos. The Father, Jeu, and the celestial
treasuries are transposed into ever higher and more distant realms until
the light treasuries become transcendent places outside the created cosmos.
The celestial realms become populated by increasingly fearsome dark
lords, becoming places of purgatory. The writings themselves become a
catalog of sins and the fate of sinners, detailing where certain reprobates
can expect to go in the afterlife, what tortures they will have to endure,
and how they will be purged and released from incarceration.
The goal of these books is to reveal to the faithful how to avoid falling
into the hands of the rulers of the realms of purgatory and instead, at
death, to ascend immediately to the sun, and then up into the transcendent
treasuries of light. These treasuries are the apartments of the unapproachable
God, the ineffable Father of all Fathers.
The only way to attain safe passage to the penthouse suite is to learn
the mysteries of Jeu through a long process of ritual initiation and then,
at death, to use this knowledge to thwart the cosmic rulers. The group’s
new books were written to give exact details about all the cosmic realms
that the soul must pass through on its way to the now transcendent world
of light.
The cosmology of the Jeuians in these new books is very complicated
and layered. At the edge of the universe is the outer darkness, the realm of
utter destruction for the worst sinners. It is described as a dark ouroboros
dragon, encircling the world, with torture chambers in its belly.