This year’s Christmas card theme is from classic Gnosticism, which was a long lost religion contemporary with early Christianity. This ancient religion expressed a respect for the freedom and dignity of other beings in direct opposition to the Christian obsession with conforming others to their dogma. Early Gnostics embraced non-conformity to the world that epitomizes "being in the world, but not of the world." Gnosticism, unlike other orthodox religions, did not embrace morality or ethics as rule systems. To the Gnostics these systems were creations of the Demiurge and were used to serve his purposes. This Demiurge is the main subject of this year’s card. In the Gnostic cosmology, the Demiurge takes over the world with the triumph of Christianity. Gnosticism along with its scriptures that made up one of ancient Asia Minor’s greatest literary movements, was destroyed and wiped off the face of the Earth. Historically, the secret underground Gnostic sects that survived are unknown, however a later sect known as the Manicheans was founded by the Persian prophet Mani (AD 215-277) and survived publicly until the 13th century. The Gnostics were about free-thinking as opposed to the general religious mindset. They envisioned a supreme being or power above the Demiurge whom they realized by transcending the Demiurge of this plane. In the Gnostic cosmologies it is the Demiurge who created this world and enfleshed us. Gnosis means literally "knowledge" and the ancient Gnostic bypassed this world and the Demiurge by attaining the secret inner gnosis while refining the mind and body in sanctification from the world. The Gnostics who attained this gnosis would write about it in the newly learned magic of writing and express the truth in a simple symbolism of myth. Because the Gnostics expressed truths in the form of myth, their writings become subject to multiple meanings and interpretations, which was heresy to the more orthodox Christianity that embraced theology in the form of absolute literal truths and commandments. Still the booming literary movement which was Gnosticism continued to prolifically produce these mythical writings that communicated undeniably profound truths. This mythical style has always been the intention of these allegorical Christmas cards that depict images worth at least a thousand words. This ancient literary movement was burned off the face of the Earth around the time the early Catholic Empire was burning down the legendary library of Alexandria. Perhaps the intention of burning so many pagan scriptures was to cover-up the fact that the Apostle Paul had been plagiarizing the Gnostic truths in his many letters written during his travels throughout Asia Minor. The apostle Paul’s lengthy letters make up most of the Bible’s New Testament. To this day the church imposes a hierarchy on adherents, which leads to a nebulous God ruling through the Son of God, Jesus Christ. On the other hand Gnostics encouraged direct experience of the G-d existing within the depth that is beyond silence. Some Gnostics sought this through many practices that ranged from illumination attained by states of ecstasy, while others believed in attaining direct knowledge of G-d by fasting, abstinence, and meditation. This directly reflects the unorthodox free-thinking attitude of Gnosticism, which fueled Asia Minor’s literary movement of Gnostic scriptures written by common people who through better education were acquiring the knowledge of writing. At the same time that Asia Minor was free-thinking through many different forms of Gnosticism, Christianity was becoming the only state religion by virtue of Constantine trying to fuse the outskirts of his empire. This idea has its roots in the uniquely political religion of Judaism. The Hebrew religion was a well established wedding of church and state and with Christianity, the same idea was being applied to Rome with Constantine becoming a saint. The Gnostics reacted to this by writing that the jealous and wrathful God of the Hebrews was really the Demiurge (from the word demiourgos, meaning public worker or builder). To the Gnostics, the Demiurge was not the highest G-d but instead was merely one of the lower emanations. The Demiurge was the builder of the physical planet. The Gnostics believed that the Demiurge could be surpassed by humanity through spiritual attainment. In AD 381 however, the Emperor Theodosius I officially recognized one single branch of orthodox Catholicism. This was the beginning of the ensuing violence and sanctions against the Gnostics as well as other non-Christians. And the pope ruled the world until the conquering ruler Napoleon imprisoned the pope in 1798 and decreed that "no pope would ever rule the secular world again." This brings us to the description of the Lion/Serpent creature on this year’s card surrounded, like Jehovah by the four cherubim of the elements that compose manifested existence and also represent the four fixed astrological signs of the Zodiac. This comes from a classical description of the Gnostic Demiurge found by the recently discovered Nag Hamaddi scriptures unearthed in 1946. As usual the card Kabballistically interprets this Gnostic idea where the higher metaphysical emanations known as aeons are similar to the Kabballistic beings that exist on the sephirotic planes. The study of the Kabballa wakes one up to deeper and higher realities and the soul becomes ignited with Gnosis. These insights into the Kabballa become mystical experiences thus inspiring creations such as this Christmas card. On this Christmas card the Demiurge is depicted as a lion-faced serpent. According to legend, the Demiurge was created by the Goddess Sophia, which is the Greek word for wisdom. The desire of Sophia created the Lion/Serpent Demiurge who’s eyes were like flashing lightning. The compromised Sophia, cast the Demiurge away to the place where no immortal one would see what she created out of ignorance. She surrounded the demiurge with a luminous cloud and placed a throne in the middle of it so that only the Holy Spirit would see. The Holy Spirit who is called mother of the living. Then Sophia named the Demiurge Yaltabaoth. From the Nag Hamaddi find, The Apocryphon of John states, "this is the first archon who took a great power from his mother ... and he is ambitious in his arrogance which is in him. For he said, ‘I am God and there is no other God beside me’, for he is ignorant of his strength, the place form which he had come." This God is the creator or material existence and is enthroned Kabballistically on the fourth sphere of Chessed represented by the four pillared throne with IHVH inscribed for the divine name Jehovah corresponding to Chessed. Beneath the throne is the child of the pentagram for it was the Demiurge with the help of Sophia who created mankind. The Demiurge is surrounded by the four elemental cherubim where the Lion of Leo breaths a fiery sword toward the Demiurge. It is said by the occultist Blavanski that Ialdabaoth was lion-headed to represent the age of Leo when the spring equinox was in Leo and humanity evolved conscious minds 18.5 million years ago. The Lion/Serpent represents human beginnings when we began to think our way out of the animal kingdom. The Demiurge is represented on this year’s card because of the current desperate struggle amongst the powers that be. The Demiurge represented political power in the name of God to many Gnostics. This contradicted their sanctified ideas. In the coming year we will desperately try to save the computer run world from breaking down in the year 2000. This Y2K problem that is only recently being mentioned to the mainstream has been anticipated since the 1960’s by those who know. For the sake of those still naive about Y2K, basically since the beginning of the computer industry, only two bytes were used for dates in all industry and infra-structure programming in order to conserve space. Now the year ‘1999’ will eventually become ‘2000’ but only ‘00’ to computers because the world dates everything with only two bytes of memory. Now although the solution is simple to anyone versed in programming, because of the widespread nature of this problem, there are a lot of programs that need two bytes added to the year and 1900 added once to it in order to make ‘99’ into ‘1999’ and eventually ‘2000’. Perhaps a flag should also be set to some value after addition to insure that 1900 is never added to the date in the file again. The point is that this problem has been anticipated for a long time and while the year 2000 approaches, the current hard-working, well-intentioned President of America is being steamrolled by a political agenda that stoops to sex-scandal tactics for lack of a better way to score an impeachment. Kenneth Star, who has been behind the pose’ to bring the President down for five years and $40,000,000 of voting taxpayer money, is also ironically directly involved with the Y2K problem. It was Kenneth Star among other players who were working as programmers in the 1960’s placing the dates in his programs within two bytes of data sure to crash in the year 2000. Like the Christian coup of Rome today right-wing self-righteous, hypocrites are trying to impeach a perfectly good President over their ideals of morality. This coup will soon be championed by a right-wing politician’s bid for the election of 2000. The Y2K problem will no doubt be used to win the election not unlike a hostage crisis victory by the right-wing Ronald Reagan. This implies that a year into the year 2000 will bring about a presidential victory patting itself on the back for solving the Y2K problem. Remember that the problem is large because of its size, however to a programmer, adding two bytes and adding 1900 is relatively simple. But Y2K won’t be solved until millions and millions of lines of code are changed. This will take an army of programmers many years, but a well made program can make the changes in seconds. This is why the machine language of computers is drawn on the card in hexadecimal IBCIDIC characters behind the face of Sophia who is the mother of the Demiurge. This Hexadecimal message is from the Book of Revelations Chapter 13:3 and says "One of its heads seemed to have a mortal wound, but its mortal wound was healed and the whole Earth followed the beast with wonder." Ironically we live in the time when the monitory systems of the world rest on the programs within a super computer affectionately named The Beast. In response to this and also with symbolism from Revelations the flaming sword of logos, that is prophesied to bring down the Beast, approaches the head of the Demiurgic beast from the mouth of Leo, which will one day be where the fall equinox shall be located in a couple hundred years when the Age of Aquarius becomes official 18.5 million years after the Spring Equinox was in Leo.
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