Welcome to Gaia! ::

Don't know much about it but it's not Gnosticism. Early Christian sects labeled as gnostic were pretty much any sect of Christianity that St. Irenaeus and Terturllian didn't like. Next many of elements of these "gnostic" sects were appropriated into mainstream Christianity. The only thing all gnostic sects had in common was that they were matter-spirit dualist.

Because most people don't know what gnostic is wink . It's the whipping boy of those who need a boogyman and for new agers its whatever you want it to be.

The only similarity to Gnostics is the belief that the serpent was something good. In the Sethian Creation story, the serpent was a child of Sophia, God's wisdom, who aided Adam and Eve so they could recognize the difference between moral good and evil and not be at the whims of nature and instincts, so that one day their descendents would recognize the Christ when he did appear.

Well yeah. They believed that aspects of God flowed forth from him in synergistic pairs called Aeons which represented different levels of understanding of God. When this pair worked together to contemplate God, they would create another lesser pair of Aeons. The lowest level of understanding was Sophia and below her was matter which came about when Sophia tried to contemplate God without her partner. Not only did she produce matter but also a false image of god, a craftsman who could only form what was around him but is unable to create anything.

To kinda illustrate this, imagine a well overflowing of water. The source of this water would be God. Each of these pairs would be how far you were away from the source of this water and ground around the well would be the world.

I do have to point out that Gnostic was not one sect but rather a category for many different sects that had some overlap but not much. Some sects labelled as gnostic had nothing in common at all. It was basically a slur.

Edit: What I'm sharing is one of the surviving fragments from one of the sects, specifically a group called the Sethians.

Yes, I have heard of Luciferanism. I also am aware that it is technically a Christian sect.

LeVey is atheistic satanism. I always considered luciferianism and theistic satanism to be synonymous terms, even though I already know it is improper to do so.