In the previous episode, we heard how the fallen Aeon named  Logos unexpectedly found himself in a new dimension referred to as the deficiency or the imitation. This dimension resembles the dreams of the Aeons of the Fullness, but in a knock-off type of inferior form. The imitation is all shadows and mirrors without truth or life. Logos was horrified by what had emerged from him as shadows and phantoms of his glorious Pleroma.

The manifestation of our universal space and the apparent matter contained within it was caused by the movement of Logos–the Fall. It was the shadows of the Pleroma of Logos that emerged to form this universe.

When Logos stopped trying to bully the shadows away, he turned from the presumptuous, egoic thought that had caused it all and began to remember his Self and the Father and his brothers in the Fullness. This remembrance allowed Logos to return home.

Logos and the Fullness began to produce a new offspring designed to “upset those who were in the defect.” This fruit is called the Second Order of Powers and it differed from both the original Aeons of the Fullness and the shadows of the deficiency. Whereas those of the deficiency arose from the egoic thought that led Logos to overreach and fall, “those of the remembrance” arose from Logos having the good thought of the Father and the Fullness. Those of the deficiency represent phantoms and confusion, whereas the new fruit, the Second Order Powers, are filled with the Holy Spirit that confers the consciousness and life of the Father.

The shadows of the deficiency that emerged from the Fall are small, dead, and ignorant of what came before. The Second Order Powers are emanations of the restored Logos, fitted into the Boundary. They come one by one to populate the cosmos with life.

We Second Order Powers come from the Fullness above. Logos emanated us with all of the inherent virtues of the Fullness that arise from “harmony and mutual love.” We have a pre-disposition to seek and pray to the Father and we are born with a thought and idea of the One Consciousness of which we are all a part.  We are designed to work together in “unity and unanimity,” which mirrors the Simple Golden Rule. 

And now a strange and tragic thing occurred. It turns out that when those of the remembrance came upon those of the imitation, they attempted to overthrow them out of an inherent sense of self-righteousness because, after all, the Second Order Powers are from “the good thought,” and the deficiency is not. The tragedy of what occurred next in this unfolding gnostic cosmogeny still affects us today, for no sooner did the Second Order of Powers begin manifesting on the material stage, they found themselves in mortal combat with the shadows of the imitation.

The Tripartite Tractate says that the Second Order Powers “fought against the order of those of the likeness, while the order of those of the likeness wages war against the representations and acts against it alone, because of its wrath.”

“The two orders assaulted one another, fighting for command because of their manner of being. As a result, they were submerged in forces and natures in accord with the condition of mutual assault, having lust for power and all other things of this sort. It is from these that the vain love of glory draws all of them to the desire of the lust for power, while none of them has the exalted thought nor acknowledges it…”

We Second Order Powers continually battle the archons of the Fall. We are a mixed creation of life from above and death from below.