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The Gate and Gate 2
The Gate, a 1987 film, offers the familiar Oops!-
we-accidently-opened-the-gate-to-hell-and-letthe-demons-out!
theme in a suburban, “Home
Alone” setting. In the 1992 sequel, a teen sacrifices
a hamster to invoke the powers of darkness.
Gnosticism
Gnosticism is a term for a broad range of different
religious movements. Despite this variation, what
we might call generic Gnosticism is usually
described as having an identifiable, coherent
ideology that includes such doctrines as the
notion that this world, and especially the human
body, were the products of an evil deity—the
demiurge (a term originally utilized by Plato to
refer to a demigod who created the world in the
Timaeus)—who also created the human body for
the purpose of trapping human spirits in the
physical world. Our true home is the absolute
spirit, referred to as the pleroma.
According to the Gnostic myth of creation,
Sophia, one of the spiritual beings residing in the
pleroma, inadvertently created the demiurge. The
demiurge then created the cosmos by emanating
a series of different levels, ranging from as few as
three to as many as 360. Each of these levels is
governed by an archon, who acts as a guardian
preventing the sparks of light (i.e., the divine
95
essence of individual human beings) from returning
to the pleroma. Part of the knowledge
imparted to the Gnostics is information on how
to bypass these archons on their journey back to
the pleroma.
One of the results of conceptualizing the
cosmos as being the creation of an evil divinity is
that the beings in the heavenly spheres surrounding
the earth—the archons—are also evil.
Familiarity with Gnostic ideology allows us to
understand certain otherwise unintelligible
passages in the writings of early Christians, who
were clearly influenced by the Gnostic perspective;
for example, the oft-quoted passage about spiritual
warfare in the Book of Ephesians: “We are not
contending against flesh and blood, but against
the principalities, against the powers, against the
world rulers of this present darkness, against the
spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly
places” (6:12). What, one might well ask, is the
meaning of “the spiritual hosts of wickedness in
the heavenly places” Isn’t the locus of evil spiritual
forces in hell, which is traditionally conceptualized
as being below rather than above the earth
In this passage and others that might be cited,
“heavenly wickedness” refers to the archons. Even
the word “rulers” here is a translation of the Greek
archon, so that the original passage reads,“archons
of this present darkness.”
A standard tenet of Gnostic Christianity was