The Backstory of the FGS
“Now, in your love, I turned into a myth…”
Rumi, Persian poet and mystic, c. 1250 CE
Cording on Infinity Ridge, Gaucin, Andalucia, circa 2010
JLL, who recovered and restored the sacred narrative of the Wisdom Goddess, designates the August 2020 version as FGS 1.0, by contrast to the “legacy version” in Not in His Image which appeared in November 2006. It was preceded by the first public release of the narrative on the Internet four years earlier in 2002 when metahistory.org was launched. At that moment the title “Fallen Goddess Scenario” and the term “Archon” entered public discourse and discussion in printed and digital media. Thus, JLL introduced the world to the Archons. To this day, an internet search shows “Fallen Goddess Scenario” (not to be confused with the “descent of the goddess” theme) to be attached originally and exclusively to his name. With any genuine work of art there is attention to provenance: the place of origin or earliest known history of something; a record of ownership of a work of art or an antique, used as a guide to authenticity or quality.
From the early drafts of 2002 to the definitive FGS 1.0 of 2020, the narrative underwent continuous work involving addition and clarification of detail, new incidents and expanded episodes, revision of some passages (especially concerning the role of the Aeon Christos and the Symbiont), and extrapolation of the narrative coming down to the current iteration, FGS 7.7, titled “The Beauty to Come,” which describes events happening today.
Enuma Elish
There can be no one single author of a myth. Most myths have been transmitted orally through the generations long before they were written down. Scholars who investigate this process are handicapped by the dubious state of the surviving evidence. They routinely designate the earliest myth by reference to the oldest surviving material, the earliest textual evidence. Obviously, that designation holds up precariously: discovery of older surviving materials, which can happen at any time, obliges them to back-date the earliest case.
As it stands today, the earliest known case of textual evidence of a “creation myth” comes from the Middle East, India, or Egypt, depending on the “expert” you consult. Some scholars assert that there is no evidence of a written myth anywhere in the world earlier than the cuneiform tablets from around 2000 BCE. These are the seven tablets of the Enuma Elish, the Babylonian creation myth. Even so, experts have determined that this narrative is a “resencion” or edited and modified version of an older myth going back to the Sumerians around 4000 BCE. The title Enuma Elish comes from the first two words of the story, meaning “when on high.”
When on high the heaven had not been named,
Firm ground below had not been called by name,
Naught but primordial Apsu, their begetter,
(And) Mummu –Tiamat, she who bore them all
One of the clay tablets of the Enuma Elish
The Enuma Elish was recovered by English archaeologist Austen Henry Layard in 1849 in the ruined Library of Ashurbanipal at Nineveh (Mosul, Iraq), and first translated into English by Assyriologist George Smith in 1876. It consists of about a thousand lines on seven tablets, the fifth of which is missing. The tablets contain numerous passages that parallel closely the Fallen Goddess Scenario. It uses the name Tiamat for the Sophia of the Gnostic Mysteries in her preterrestrial form. Close study shows that Tiamat was the celestial serpent form of Sophia before she turned into the Earth. The Sumerian word for the earth is Ki, and the name for the goddess who turned into the earth is Nammu. Scholars debate if the name Mummu in the fourth line may be a trope or guise for another name, Nammu. Mummu is an Akkadian loanword from Sumerian umun, “main body, bulk, life-giving force.” It also signifies “knowledge, knowing” as active and conscious engagement, contrasted to the primordial inertia of Apsu (Sumerian Abzu), the abyss of intergalactic space. In Gnostic sources, Apsu is called the Aeon Bythos, Depth.
To those who can read the lines, and in between the lines, the opening passage of the Enuma Elish describes the presence of the preterrestrial body of Sophia in the galactic arms. It explains that this cosmic presence on high is to become “the one who bore them all,” that is, all living beings. In another sense, Sophia-Tiamat bore or bared up to the immense burden of the extra-Pleromic forces she encountered before morphing into the Earth, knowing what she was doing and holding steady. Like other cognates of Sophia, such as the Persian Anahita, Nammu is associated both with the solid Earth and the ocean. The planet Earth is composed of about 75 percent water.
Missing Myth
So far, so good. One might think it would be possible to construct the FGS from Sumerian sources. But alas, this is not possible. Only clues and episodes of the sacred narrative appear in the Sumerian tablets, and much of the myth is a baffling jumble, like a rebus that cannot be sorted or solved. What about looking elsewhere, then? Egyptian and Indian (Hindu) creation myths are also assumed to date from equally remote periods, millennia in the past, but the surviving textual evidence is considered to be more recent than the Babylonian tablets. Those sources also present clues, tropes, and episodic fragments that refer, or may refer, to the Sophianic myth of the Mysteries. But that is all, scattered ruins. No coherent and consistent plot-line to be found.
The construction of the FGS presents a special case of mythic reconstruction. JLL maintains that it comes down to us from ancient Iran. He identifies the matrix of the Magian Order on the Urmian plateau south of the Caucasus mountains. Ur-mia means “root mother.” That being so, wouldn’t it make sense to look into the earliest surviving writings in ancient Persian, among the so-called Avestan languages? Yes, it would, but alas, there is hardly anything to find.
Scholars apply four titles to the oldest surviving material from ancient Persia: the Avesta (primary text), Zend-Avesta (commentaries), Bundahishn (compilation of Zoroastrian lore in Pahlavi), and the Yasts (ritual hymns). Unfortunately, most of this material comes through the filter of Zoroastrianism which dated long after the foundation of the Magian Order and represents a deviation from the original sources. Even more unfortunately, the condition of these earliest dated materials (linked to the Old Persian Empire of 700 BCE) is appalling.
Three-fourths of the Vesta is missing. The rest of it are copies of copies of copies dating back only to redactions of the 9th Century CE, and these works are “characterized by their dryness, their disheartening monotony, and their platitude.” In A History of Religious Ideas, Vol. I (cited here, p 302), Mircea Eliade frankly warns that anyone looking into ancient Persian literature “cannot fail to be disappointed.” It’s as if one were searching for crucial intelligence in a leaked CIA document that has been redacted to the point of uselessness. To make matters worse, any valuable texts from ancient Iranian sources that may have been preserved were destroyed at the burning of Persepolis in 330 BCE, and then again, with the Islamic conquest of Persia after 633 AD. That’s a span of a thousand years of destruction.
Where to go next?
JLL’s suggestion that the original sources of the Sophianic narrative were in ancient Iran cannot be verified by any textual or archeological evidence. Bear in mind the differences between oral sources and written sources. A story preserved in an oral tradition cannot be traced except by the reports of the tradition that carries it. The proof is redundant. If the FGS in the versions dating back to 2400 BCE or earlier, were preserved orally, in poetry and song, there is no way to prove it or to recover the material which was spoken and ephemeral. No chance, then, of recovering the myth in that way. And as for written material that survives, there is nothing of significance apart from scattered references to goddess figures in Iranian mythology. For instance, Anahita is cognate with Sophia. In old Iranian, Zam is the name of the deified Earth. Zam is said to belong to a company of celestial powers, Yazatas, which may correlate to the Gnostic Aeons. But such a correlation, if it is true, does not add to the narrative content of the Sophianic myth in a palpable way.
Many other clues and correlates could be cited, but all in all, it is impossible to make a sensible story from this material. It could be said that although evidence of Sophia is found everywhere, with her names appearing in different variations in many languages, her complete story is to be found nowhere.
It may be that the Magians preserved the sacred narrative of Sophia orally for untold centuries before writing it down, if they ever did. Had that been the case, the method they used would likely to have been ritual chant and song, long strophes and poetic passages loaded with mantric keys. The language they used might have sounded something like the poetry of the celebrated Sufi poet and mystic, Rumi, born in 1207, making him a child when Parzival was being completed. The sound of the tanboor here and the lilting tones of the poems (ghazals) may offer a hint of the beauty that would have infused oral recitation of the life-story of the Aeonic Mother. The poem contains a striking line, “Now, in your love, I turned into a myth.” Rumi’s poetry often features the mysterious figure of “The Beloved,” or “Beloved Lord,” who is never named.
Could it be that the Beloved is none other than Sophia herself? Listening to these verses sung to perfection in Persian, it is clear how that Indo-European language stands distinct from Arabic or Semitic. Something almost liquescent comes through the sounds. Is this nectar of language the last faint echo of the sounds of the Magians reciting the myth of the Fallen Goddess? Does this mystical poetry describe encountering the Organic Light, the radiance streaming from the forehead of the chalice-holder? And the drunken bliss of that beholding? Some of the lines would suggest that is exactly the case. And also, perhaps, explain why her story was not written down. Read the translations closely and see for yourself.
The Recovery
The source materials of the FGS rely not only on what survives from writings attributed to the Gnostics, but also upon the writings of their adversaries, the early christian ideologues, the so-called heresy-hunters: Irenaeus, Hippolytus, Epiphanius. It so happens that the passage in the narrative describing how the Aeon Sophia turned into the Earth only survives in a paraphrase by Irenaeus (Against Heresies, Book One, Ch. 4.2). Scholars assert that the Coptic texts from Nag Hammadi were copies of Greek originals, although this presumption cannot and has not been proven. Nevertheless, the fact that Irenaeus could paraphrase something the Gnostics wrote implies that they did in fact write down the narrative, including that episode of paramount importance. Lacking the discovery of other Gnostic works, it is impossible to know the extent to which they may have rendered the narrative in written form. It could have been considerable. The destruction of the scrolls and papyri stored in the library system of the Mysteries in Alexandria and elsewhere is beyond reckoning.
JLL based the reconstruction of the Sophianic narrative on what remains of Greek and Coptic materials dating from about 2000 years ago at the beginning of the Christian Era, or Common Era, CE. But having found the main plot in those sources, he continued to scour through myth and legend from cultures all around the world to identify correlating elements, any slight clue or trope that might refer to Sophia. In the mindset of animism, the Aeonic Mother was all-present, detected in countless guises and epiphanies, such as Potnia Theron, the Cretan Mistress of the Animals, and Coatlicue (COH-at-LEE-cue-aye), the Goddess of the Serpent Skirt among the Aztecs. The range of her diverse powers is so vast that each attribute had to be extracted, distilled, and concentrated in a discrete agency, a specific goddess, such as Peitho, Goddess of Persuasion, Themis, guardian of social order, and Athena, the agency of sovereign mind. Those allusions stem from Helenic culture alone. Dozens of other examples from elsewhere came under the author’s consideration as he developed the myth.
But he found her complete story nowhere in those other cultures, and only the Gnostic sources provided a sound basis for reconstructing it. Doing so over fifteen years, he discovered that the act of myth-making centered on the Wisdom Goddess has a unique effect: those who engage it become the part of the myth as it progresses. They are not merely the messengers of it, but the living embodiment. “Now, in your love, I turned into a myth….”
With Sophia, the heirs to her narrative living today become as if the original benefactors of it. As if becomes as is.
Over time, revisions of the Home Story came to include motifs and themes carefully selected from Sumerian, Indian (Puranic), and Egyptian myths. One component of this syncretic exercise was outstanding. JLL grafted the Hindu myth of the Nine Avatars of Vishnu into the narrative where it features in Episode Four, Unilateral Dreaming. He also drew upon the Vedic image of the saptaparna, the seven-leafed plant, to develop the motif of the calibration of the Anthropic genome. Then again, the same motif recurs by reference to the serpent crown of Amon in Egyptian religion, the figure representing Thelete who faces Hathor in the Shakta altar of ancestral devotion.
Inception
No myth ever has one single author, but due to the exceptional challenge of recovering the Fallen Goddess Scenario, the myth had to be initiated in that way. It required a single agent of inception. So it happens that one individual is the single and exclusive source of the FGS, not to be confused with other myths about “descent of the goddess” or the “chained woman” of Andromeda, although the latter presents a correlative or mirroring narrative. There is nothing comparable in the world to the Home Story. An internet search for “Fallen Goddess Scenario” will confirm that fact. It is an example of creative mythology founded on life-long training in esoteric, religious, and historical studies, and practices in experimental mysticism.
The backstory of its development presented in this unit tells how the myth was developed up to the moment of the Terma, August 2008. From that moment coming forward, the evolution of the narrative went into hyper-drive. While it is conceivable that the mythologist could have restored the myth if the Terma had not been received, what unfolded during and after 2008 to drive, escalate, and expand the myth would not have been conceivable without the Terma. The post-Terma material is the outgrowth of events and realizations in the life of the author and increasing numbers of others who now engage the sacred narrative as a life-practice.
That being so, it would be fitting to conclude this unit with a look at the current iterations of the FGS as seen elsewhere on Nemeta. FGS 7.1 begins at the dawn of the 21st Century:
7.1 The Gaia-Sapiens Exchange : May 2000, Arques, France, stabilization of the Organic Light – July 2002 metahistory.org, The GAIA MYTHOS, initial public release of the FGS – March 2003 Infinity Ridge – NIHI 2006, legacy version of the narrative with extensive disclosure of the Organic Light
7.2 The Terma of Gaia Awakening : August 2008, inception of Planetary Tantra
7.3 Reset : March 2011 – March 2014, the Gaian Navigation Experiment
7.4 Correction Begins : March 2014 – December 2014, The Kalika War Party – August 2016, The Aeonic Mother has agency – February to October 2017, Mandela Effect Decoded – January 2018, The Charlotte Working
7.5 Nemeta: September 2018, the modern Mystery School based on the Maitreya Process and dedicated to the restoration of the Humanities – 2020
7.6 The Home Story released: August 2020 – Forthcoming: August 2021, 15th anniversary edition of NIHI – September 18, 2021 Third Anniversary of Nemeta….
7.7 The Beauty to Come