Is it possible to create a gnostic fantasy setting which is not dark fantasy?

The concept of the demiurge is pretty dark.

>What's dark about the more Neoplatonic nondualist sort of "Demiurge is there but w/e" brand of Gnosticism?

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demiurge
>Plato, as the speaker Timaeus, refers to the Demiurge frequently in the Socratic dialogue Timaeus, c. 360 BC. The main character refers to the Demiurge as the entity who "fashioned and shaped" the material world. Timaeus describes the Demiurge as unreservedly benevolent, and hence desirous of a world as good as possible. The world remains imperfect, however, because the Demiurge created the world out of a chaotic, indeterminate non-being. Plato's work Timaeus is a philosophical reconciliation of Hesiod's cosmology in his Theogony, syncretically reconciling Hesiod to Homer.
>In Numenius's Neo-Pythagorean and Middle Platonist cosmogony, the Demiurge is second God as the nous or thought of intelligibles and sensibles.
>Plotinus and the later Platonists worked to clarify the Demiurge. To Plotinus, the second emanation represents an uncreated second cause (see Pythagoras' Dyad). Plotinus sought to reconcile Aristotle's energeia with Plato's Demiurge, which, as Demiurge and mind (nous), is a critical component in the ontological construct of human consciousness used to explain and clarify substance theory within Platonic realism (also called idealism). In order to reconcile Aristotelian with Platonian philosophy, Plotinus metaphorically identified the demiurge (or nous) within the pantheon of the Greek Gods as Zeus.
>By Valentinus, in creating this world out of Chaos the Demiurge was unconsciously influenced for good; and the universe, to the surprise even of its Maker, became almost perfect. The Demiurge regretted even its slight imperfection, and as he thought himself the Supreme God, he attempted to remedy this by sending a Messiah. To this Messiah, however, was actually united Jesus the Saviour, Who redeemed men. These are either hylikoí, or pneumatikoí.

The worldview of Plato himself was that while the material world is real and not bad, is it ontologically dependant on the archetypes the human mind naturally create.
His Demiurge was a metaphore of this concept and the one wih the cave was just about how someone centered on learning wisdom is lost in touch with his more mundane peers and he must relearn mundane matters to not be seen as a fool by them and even then he is likely to fail and be persecuted, but it's still his duty to try as a wise man.
The evil Demiurge with the true god above is only a form of a very large spectrum of early christian heresies inspired by Plato.

The platonic demiurge is not what most people think of when they hear the term. They think of the christian heretical demiurge.

>They think of the christian heretical demiurge.
You mean the one from Valentinus with compassion and regret and love and remorse for his fuckups, or the one from /fringe/ memes?

The one that Irenaeus rants about in Against the Heresies. I forgot which gnostics were around during that time.

So you mean the Valentinian one:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demiurge#Valentinus
>It is in the system of Valentinus that the name Dēmiourgos is used, which occurs nowhere in Irenaeus except in connection with the Valentinian system; we may reasonably conclude that it was Valentinus who adopted from Platonism the use of this word. When it is employed by other Gnostics either it is not used in a technical sense, or its use has been borrowed from Valentinus. But it is only the name that can be said to be specially Valentinian; the personage intended by it corresponds more or less closely with the Yaldabaoth of the Ophites, the great Archon of Basilides, the Elohim of Justinus, etc.

I guess so. The point is that it doesn't matter much what he said, Irenaeus's teachings on gnostics has been the number one text for christian theologians who want to find out what gnosticism is about.

Replace the twisted ankle with a guy whose entire village and family just got buried under 2 meters of boiling lava and suddenly that comic doesn't really work the way you think it works.

Except for all those core texts on "Gnostic" thought which show the massive variety under the insufficient category of "Gnostic".

For the sake of the argument - if the demiurge hadn't created the world in the first place, there would be neither village, nor family for the guy to lose.

Better?

My point is there's more to the broad spectrum of Gnostic thought than "Demiurge is evil", "god is the devil", "everything is awful" or whatever reductive simplification folks come up with.

Sure but that's not what most people think about when they think Gnosticism.

>the corpus of Gnostic texts, such as those found at Qumran with a number of mainline texts (Dead Sea Scrolls) are not what people think of when they think Gnosticism

Then enlighten me to what they think?

Sure but if that's interresting ? what is wrong with using sources that are not what most people know ?

They think they're Christian heretics who believe the material world is evil.

That sounds great.

as opposed to proper christians who think the material world and everything in it is sinful

Well, then you have the Yazidi belief in Melek Taus (I have a feeling I got both names wrong there), in which the demiurge is in charge of the world but they're okay with it and worship him directly.
Misunderstanding of this tradition is where you get stories about 'Middle-Eastern Satan-worshippers out in the desert.'

The further we go on the timeline, the worse and worse Christians seem to get at Theology.

TES isn't dark fantasy.

Everything's dark fantasy when you talk to an edgy enough fan of it.

Only Christcucks fall for the Demiurge is evil meme.

>I have a feeling I got both names wrong there
Nah, you got it.

>they're okay with it and worship him directly.
The Peacock Feathered Angel isn't Creator for them. He's an angel of fortune; life and death, weal and woe. Connotations of fate.

>Misunderstanding of this tradition is where you get stories about 'Middle-Eastern Satan-worshippers out in the desert.'
Eeeyup, we also have freaky groups like Mandaeans as referenced above who reject Christ in favor of John the Baptist and an entity called Maziel, the Angel of Logos.

No, most christian groups believe the material world is good since god created it. It's in book of genesis mate.

Those gospels were branded as heresy because they go wildly against all the evidence had of Jesus shortly after his dead as laid down by the Apostles.

The key difference is that the books of the new test were written either by the Apostles themselves or dictated to writers or written by people who worked with the apostles, thusly they're all penned within loving memory of Christ (within 50 years of the occurance)

In contrast, the heretical texts you mentioned all popped up 300-400 years afterward, and conflict wildly, such as a text where Jesus says to make women more like men because women are weak.

Also to be totally fair to Gnostics, they lost the fight because the Catholics and Orthodox aren't so weighed down in elite occultism and thus easier for the common man to grasp.

There are seven separate apostolic churches and over 70,000 different Protestant groups, and yes those allllllll have come to their own conclusions, so before you make that comment again, consider how fucking enormous of an umbrella you're casting

That has little to do with why they're 'dark', let alone 'grimdark'.

>300-400 years afterward

Gospel of Thomas:
>Valantasis dates Thomas to 100 – 110 AD, with some of the material certainly coming from the first stratum which is dated to 30 – 60 AD. J. R. Porter dates the Gospel of Thomas much later, to 250 AD

Gospel of Phillip:
>The Gospel of Philip was written between 150 AD and 350 AD, while Philip himself lived in the first century, making it extremely unlikely to be his writing. Most scholars hold a 3rd-century date of composition.

Gospel of Truth:
>The Gospel of Truth was probably written in Greek between 140 and 180 by Valentinian Gnostics (or, as some posit, by Valentinus himself).

Thunder: Perfect Mind:
>As to dating, Anne McGuire writes: "Thunder, Perfect Mind exists only in the Coptic version found at Nag Hammadi (NHC VI,2:13,1-21,32). The author, date, and place of composition are unknown, but a cultural milieu like that of second- or third-century Alexandria is plausible. In any case, it is clear that the text was originally composed in Greek well before 350 C.E., the approximate date of the Coptic manuscript."

Apocalypse of Adam:
>first to second century AD. via MacConkey and Meyer for Brill.