Before the Planets: A Brief Map of Gnostic Cosmology

I want to share a myth with you.

Not because I think it’s literally true. But because it’s one of the oldest psychological maps we have — a story about how awareness forgets itself, and what it takes to remember. If you’ve ever felt like something in you knows more than your circumstances allow you to access, this myth is for you. If you’ve ever sensed that the structures shaping your life aren’t the whole story, this myth already lives in your body.

The Gnostics were a loose collection of early spiritual communities — some Jewish, some Christian, some harder to categorize — who shared a radical intuition: that the world as we experience it is not the deepest reality. That something got lost, or buried, or forgotten. And that the work of a human life is to remember what was covered over.

They told this intuition as cosmology. I’m going to offer it as psychology.

The Pleroma: Fullness Before Forgetting

In the beginning — if we can even use that word — there was the pleroma. Fullness. Undivided wholeness. Not a place, but a quality of being: complete, coherent, nothing missing.

You might recognize this as the state before wounding. Before schema. Before the strategies we built to survive contact with a world that couldn’t hold all of us.

The pleroma isn’t naive. It isn’t pre-consciousness. It’s the ground we came from and the ground we’re trying to find our way back to but not to regress, but to integrate.

Sophia: The Descent Into Form

Within the pleroma, the Gnostics described emanations — aspects of divine consciousness extending outward like light. One of these was Sophia. Wisdom.

Sophia wanted to know. She reached beyond the boundaries of the pleroma — not out of sin, but out of longing. And in that reaching, she fell. She descended into density, into matter, into forgetting.

This is the myth of consciousness entering form. Of awareness becoming embodied and, in the process, losing access to what it knew before.

If you’ve ever felt like you came into this life knowing something you’ve spent years trying to recover, Sophia’s fall is your story.

The Demiurge: The God Who Doesn’t Know

When Sophia fell, she inadvertently generated a being — the demiurge. A creator god who shaped the material world, who believed himself to be the highest power, who mistook his limited domain for the totality of existence.

The demiurge isn’t evil in the way later traditions would frame Satan. He’s more tragic than that. He’s ignorance with authority. He’s the part of consciousness that builds systems and mistakes those systems for truth. He’s the voice that says this is all there is — not out of malice, but because he genuinely doesn’t know there’s anything beyond his perception.

You know this figure. He shows up whenever a structure mistakes itself for reality. Whenever an institution forgets it was made by humans. Whenever a belief system closes around itself and stops questioning.

The Archons: Structuring Forces of Perception

The demiurge didn’t work alone. Beneath him — or around him, depending on the text — were the archons. Rulers of the spheres.

The Gnostics often mapped these onto the planetary spheres of ancient cosmology. But the archons weren’t planets. They were forces that shaped perception before the soul could see clearly. Each archon governed a layer of forgetting, a filter between consciousness and its origin.

To pass through the archons was to shed the distortions they imposed. To remember what you knew before you were shaped by forces that didn’t have your wholeness in mind.

This is where my work begins to intersect with theirs.

Because the archons aren’t out there. They’re in here. They’re the structuring forces of schema — the patterns laid down before we could consent, the beliefs that feel like reality because we’ve never seen past them.

Shadow work, parts work, somatic therapy, even certain uses of astrology — these are all, in some sense, archon work. Learning to see the structures that shaped perception. Learning to move through them rather than be ruled by them.

The Spark: What Remains

Here’s the part of the myth that matters most.

Despite the fall, despite the demiurge, despite the archons — something of the pleroma remains. A spark. Divine light buried in matter. Awareness that forgot itself but never stopped being what it is.

The Gnostics called this the pneuma, the spirit. It’s the part of you that recognizes truth when you hear it, even if you can’t explain why. The part that keeps reaching, keeps questioning, keeps feeling that there must be more than what the structures insist is real.

The work isn’t to escape matter. It isn’t to reject the body or the world. It’s to find the spark inside form and let it illuminate everything it touches.

Why This Matters Now

I’m not asking you to believe in Gnostic theology. I’m offering you a symbolic grammar — a way of naming what many of us already sense.

That the systems shaping our perception are not neutral. That consciousness can forget itself and still carry the imprint of what it knew. That the work of a human life involves seeing through the structures that claimed authority before we could question them.

This is the foundation I’m building from. In the next piece, I’ll show you how this myth intersects with planetary symbolism — why the archons were never planets, and what that distinction opens up for the kind of astrology that actually serves integration.