Yaldabaoth (or the "Child of Chaos")

Have you worshiped this false god, even as you do not know his name?  Like the Chaldeans, have you committed the grave sin of polytheism, tricked into it by the very Scriptures that you hold dear?

According to the Gnostics, or at least according to one significant strain of Gnosticism (see The Secret Book of John), the Source, the Ultimate Godhead, permitted visions to pass through His head, more out of passive amusement than out of intention.  His power was such that these visions took form. The visionary process begat a pair of demi-gods, and this pair begat another, and so on, until there were 182 pairs.  But there was also one last demi-god who was formed unpaired and whose name was Sophia, or Wisdom.  In her loneliness, Sophia decided to create a child companion for herself, using her own lesser, and derivative, divine powers.  According to the Book, "something came out of her that was imperfect and different in appearance from her, ... it was misshapen ... an abomination."  This abomination was called Yaldabaoth, the son of Sophia and the "Child of Chaos."

Sophia forsook her defective son, but he was able to steal some of her divine power, and with it he created Archons, angels that were counterfeit versions of true divine realities.  The Book says that "he mated with the mindlessness in him and produced authorities for himself."

And then, crucially, Yaldabaoth created an entire material universe -- one that was fatally flawed and irredeemable.  And yet in his arrogance, and once again according to the Book, echoing Genesis 20:3 and 5, he said "you shall have no other gods before me ... for I the Lord your God am a jealous God."

It is no accident that Yaldabaoth echoed the words of Jehovah in Genesis because, in Gnostic belief, our Creator, the one portrayed in the Old Testament, was Yaldabaoth.  

While this entire narrative sounds to us today like a fringe heresy, we need to remind ourselves that the Gnostic texts had as much currency in certain early Christian circles as the books that much later made it into the King James Version of the Bible, and that these texts were ruthlessly suppressed by the early bishops at around the time of Constantine's conversion and the development and promulgation of the Nicene Creed, which is recited still, routinely, in modern Christian churches.  "We believe in One God, the Father Almighty, the Maker of all things visible and invisible."

And if we are able to drop from our minds for a moment the literal "indoctrination" to which we were subjected in childhood Judeo-Christian classrooms, we see plainly that the God of Abraham was indeed petty, vindictive and often arbitrary.

And so, in the Gnostic version of things (which resonates deeply with the kabbalistic, but that's another story), this god whom we have been taught to worship from childhood should be viewed by us as an unfortunate cosmic speedbump around whom we must navigate in our quest to find union with the One True Divine.