Cast down from the worlds of light, Yaldabaoth carved a new home for himself out of the  darkness:

“When the Ruler saw his greatness, he saw only himself; he did not see another one except water and darkness. Then he thought that he alone existed. His thought was made complete by means of the word, and it appeared as a spirit moving to and fro over the waters.

And when that spirit appeared, the ruler separated the watery substance to one region, and the dry substance to another region. And from the one matter he created a dwelling place for himself. He called it “Heaven.” From the other matter the ruler created a footstool. He called it ‘earth.’” ^[1]

The Demiurge bumbled blindly along, unaware that Sophia was secretly forming the Earth through him:

“The Demiurge supposed that he made these things of himself, but he made them after [Sophia] projected them. He made Heaven without knowing Heaven… he brought earth to light without understanding earth. In every case he was ignorant of the ideas of the things he made, as well as of the Mother; and he thought he was entirely alone.” ^[2]

NOTES

“We assume that the universe is real, that it exists quite independently of human thought about it. But when we come to dealing with this universe, to human manipulation and improvement of it, we are not able to come to grips directly with this reality. We can only take in the sensory impressions reaching us from this real environmental universe, and from these construct a mental model of the universe as we know it.

Each of us must necessarily construct her/his own unique model. No two of us can receive identical data or hold identical viewpoints. In practice it turns out that the more direct one’s sensory contact and the more self-reliantly one builds one’s model (i.e., with the least uncritical borrowing of others’ conclusions), the more useful the model becomes.

These separate models which we build can be brought to any desired degree of agreement by communication and improved perception. Actually, conflicting viewpoints do not persist except where aberrations inhibit the thinking process…” ^[3]

1. ”On the Origin of the World.” The Other Bible. Ed. Willis Barnstone. Harper San Francisco, 1984. 64. [↩]
2. ”The Valentinian System Of Ptolemaeus.” The Other Bible. Ed. Willis Barnstone. Harper San Francisco, 1984. 616. [↩]
3. Jackins, Harvey. The Human Situation. Rational Island Publishers, 1973. 62-63. [↩]