Hypostasis of the Farmers

https://runesoup.com/2020/07/hypostasis-of-the-farmers/?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_term=https%3A%2F%2Frunesoup.com%2F2020%2F07%2Fhypostasis-of-the-farmers%2F&utm_content=&utm_campaign=Hypostasis+of+the+Farmers
Even after only two or so days of restricting Twitter time, possibilities for additional posts present themselves. I thought it was just going to be the extra time that putting the newsletter on indefinite hiatus would give -and it is- but it is also that thoughts are allowed to grow beyond a character limit. A tweet is a cull. Leave it alone and it might grow into a painting.
Or something less lofty, like a blog post.
One of the things that didn’t end up making it into The Winding Course (the responsive course built around lockdowns and their calamitous fallout) was an analysis of one of my very favourite Nag Hammadi texts, Hypostasis of the Archons. Gnosticism is many things but chief among them is a critique of power. Miguel regularly points out at the gnostics were the first punks. True. Or the first anarchists.
It’s simply impossible to convey how radical the gnostics’ obsessions with Genesis actually was. For diaspora Jewish and early Christian communities, Genesis was the Big Bang, The Wealth of Nations, human rights law, and biological science all at once. To approach it from the perspective of “what the fuck is going on here and how did all THIS happen??” was and is extremely dangerous to civilisation. Why is there an emperor? Why do people starve? Why was the temple destroyed? What kind of God set all this in place and -crucially- what should we do about it? Hence my ‘gnosticism is the map, animism is the territory’. You can’t just point out bad things (Twitter), you have to do something toward the good (spend less time on Twitter).
And what is so brilliant abo