Gnostic Christians who mixed early Christian beliefs with pagan Platonist and Hermetic beliefs saw the real fall as into matter. The Primal Man(a Platonic archetype or idea) descended into chaos(matter or illusion) from the Aeon above. The Bible tells of a creator god who creates Adam and Eve in earthly bodies and promises them eternal life if they don't eat from the tree of knowledge. In a particular Gnostic gospel the demiurge(evil creator) Yaldabaoth creates bodies out of the material of chaos and breathes into them the light that he stole from the divine being Sophia who fell into the chaos from above. The man and woman are ignorant like children and when a tree with a serpent on it appears in the garden Yaldabaoth made for them he tells them that if they eat it's fruit they will die. The tree is the Tree of Gnosis(knowledge)and the serpent is Sophia who bids the human couple to eat it's fruit. When they eat the fruit they become aware of the Aeon above and the Eternal Father who created the light that their souls come from. Yaldabaoth, enraged, like the Biblical creator says "I am a jealous god, there are no other gods but me." and forces the man and woman from the garden. He makes life miserable so that they will have to work hard to survive and forget the real god(the Eternal Father). Sometimes the Eternal Father has messengers or prophets. The chief prophet was Yeshua of Galilea who defied the Jewish religion of his people and taught that obedience to physical laws doesn't grant salvation, that real religion is spiritual and salvation means returning to the light created by the Eternal Father. Some people say the first Gnostic Christian was Marcion, a bishop of the early church who rejected the Old Testament and of the New Testament accepted only the Gospel of Luke and portions of the Pauline epistles. Marcion saw the world as a drama between two opposed gods, the material creator god of the Jews who demanded ritual obedience to "the law," and the god of Yeshua who is pure love and demands that people stay free from the flesh(desires for the material world) and the Jewish "law" that the creator god established to control peoples material desires. Marcion was a universalist who believed that all souls would eventually return to the "stranger god" who created the souls that came to inhabit material bodies. There are parallels between Marcion's and St. Paul's view on the Jewish "law" which was for material "fleshly" people and means nothing for those who are dead to the "flesh" and are reborn in Christ. There is also a similarity between what is in the gospels about the temptation of Christ and the material "kingdoms of the world" belonging not to god, but to the devil. At some point different beliefs got fused into what became Christian Gnosticism, which contains elements of the dualistic schools of thought known as Platonism and Hermeticism. One variety of Christian Gnosticism, Manicheaism(after the prophet Mani) includes beliefs from Buddhism and Zoroastrianism that present a dualistic worldview.
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