Demiurge

The demiurge (δημιουργός, “public worker,” craftsman) is the figure Plato introduces in the [[plato-platos-cosmology-timaeus|Timaeus]] as the divine artisan who fashions the cosmos by looking to the eternal Forms and shaping the disordered receptacle of becoming after their pattern. Plato’s demiurge is wholly good — he makes the world “as fair as could be” — and is distinct from the Forms he contemplates and the matter he shapes.

In the later tradition the figure splits. The Neoplatonists — Plotinus especially — read the demiurge as a function of nous, the second hypostasis, rather than as a separate being. The Gnostic tradition inverts the Platonic valence: the demiurge becomes the ignorant or malicious craftsman who fashions the material world as a prison, and salvation consists in escape from his realm back toward the true unknown Father. This Gnostic demiurge — often identified with the Yahweh of the Hebrew Bible — is the figure Jung engages in Answer to Job and in the Septem Sermones ad Mortuos (see hoeller-gnostic-jung-seven). The Seba lineage holds both valences — Platonic artisan and Gnostic prison-maker — as two psychological configurations of the same structural figure.

Relationships

• plato-platos-cosmology-timaeus
• anima-mundi
• sophia-achamoth-fall