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Demiurge
(redirected from demiurges)

   Also found in: Dictionary/thesaurus, Wikipedia, Hutchinson 0.04 sec.
demiurge (dĕm`ēûrj') [Gr.,=workman, craftsman], name given by Plato in a mythological passage in the Timaeus to the creator God. In Gnosticism Gnosticism (nŏs`tĭsĭzəm), dualistic religious and philosophical movement of the late Hellenistic and early Christian eras.
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 the Demiurge, creator of the material world, was not God but the Archon, or chief of the lowest order of spirits or aeons. According to the Gnostics, the Demiurge was able to endow man only with psyche (sensuous soul)—the pneuma (rational soul) having been added by God. The Gnostics identified the Demiurge with the Jehovah of the Hebrews. In philosophy the term is used to denote a divinity who is the builder of the universe rather than its creator.

Demiurge

Subordinate god who shapes and arranges the physical world. In his dialogue Timaeus, Plato identified the Demiurge as the force that fashioned the world from the preexisting materials of chaos. In Gnosticism of the early Christian era, the Demiurge is regarded as an inferior deity who had created the imperfect, material world and who belonged to the forces of evil opposing the supreme God of goodness.



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The Gnostic question-- Which of the great demiurges, Jahweh or Satan, animates and empowers the music?
If we can't believe the story about the shepherds and the angels and the wise men and the star and the manger and so on, then it's even harder to believe in Demiurges and archons and emanations and what have you.
Last year the Philadelphia Museum of Art purchased Dorothea Tanning's Birthday, 1942, an early self-portrait in which the bare-breasted, bramble-skirted heroine, accompanied by an apparently benevolent minidragon (first of the animal demiurges so often inhabiting the artist's future paintings), stands with her hand on the knob of a white door in an infinite regress of half-open portals.
 
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