The Creation

Many Christians in America believe that everything in the universe was created in six calendar days of twenty-four hours each. There is also a group within this group (and maybe outside this group, I don't know) who believe that the Earth (and by extension, the universe) is only 6,000 years old. That's six-thousand years of 365.25 days each, with each day being only 24 hours in length. For a deity who is infinite in every sense of the word, this has been a blink for Him. Existential questions aside, it doesn't stand up to the fossil record very well, or the presence of modern homo sapiens thousands of years before the Earth was supposedly created.

This belief structure speaks of a certain level of arrogance on the part of its adherents. Be they Young-Earth Creationists, or just regular Literal Creationists, this arrogance stems from the logical end result of Sola Scriptura. What is this arrogance? It is the arrogance that an infinite God would not only create an entire universe within a specified period, but that He would also test the creation he put there by going the extra mile and creating millions of years' worth of fossils, and natural physical processes that require millions of years, give humanity the rationalism and intelligence to decode these things, and then expect us to believe that all of it is a lie. The Gnostics had a term for a deity that behaved this way. They called Him the Demiurge.

At this point I must insist that I do not adhere to the Gnostic idea of the Demiurge. I do not view the Old Testament God as some demonic, corrupt, jealous creature. My point is that the God envisioned by these Creationists embodies the qualities of the Demiurge. This image of God violates the God described in the Gospels. This was one reason why the Gnostics viewed the Old Testament God and the New Testament God as different beings. This worked for their worldview and comprehension of God, but for Evangelical Christianity wherein there is only the one God, it is problematic.

How, then, should a Collyridian interpret Creation? Well, I earlier blogged about the Annunciation and the idea that the Indwelling of Mary's divinity began at that moment, and the Trinitarian God and Sophiatic Goddess were reunited in the person of Mary for the gestation of the Christ. This idea stems from a particular passage in Genesis wherein God is described in the plural (Elohim, El Elohim) and a story that I call God in a Box (if anyone knows where this story originates, please let me know. I don't want to plagiarize). The story goes like this:


Imagine a hypothetical hyper-cube. A multi-dimensional box without limitation in time or space. All that has ever been, is now, and ever will be exists within this box at this very moment and in every moment. Now, imagine that the sum totality of all of creation is expressed as a solitary, uniform expression. This is God, but not just the Trinitarian God or Mary, this is the Unified God. Let's imagine this uniform expression of everything is represented by light. It fills the box. It is everywhere and every-when. But, because there is only light, this light cannot be understood as light. It just is. At some indeterminate point, this light became self aware. How? It receded a part of itself and created darkness. This is principally an allegory, but at this moment, the Unified God was not unified. God and Goddess were separated, and through further separation, and further distancing from the unified whole, all of material creation came into being. Because light and dark differentiated each other in different ways, and all material creation is defined because of the interplay of light and shadow, when man was created and imbued with intelligence, we were made "in our image". We have the qualities of both. As Our Lady of Guadalupe is wreathed in the sun, so is the light associated with the Goddess. Because God (darkness) can only exist so long as there is a lack of light, Collyridian cosmology accepts that the Goddess withdrew from this metaphorical box and existed beyond it. So it was the task of God to instruct man and teach him to utilize his intelligence responsibly. And this is where the biblical story of creation comes from, and why God became jealous; He believed Himself to be the only deity in existence, the only deity worthy of worship. This is why the book of Jeremiah condemns the offering of sacrifice to the Goddess. And upon the Indwelling, the Goddess re-entered the metaphorical box. She was reunited with her Consort. Wisdom was returned to the Masculine Divine. This is why the message of Christ and the message of the New Testament God is love instead of wrath. Patience instead of jealousy. The schism between God and Goddess was reunited in Christ and Mary.


Now, it is the goal of all of creation to recede back to its primal state when the box was filled solely with light and nothing else. All of our collective experiences, our consciousness, our love and life will be unified with the light, and it really doesn't matter if God created the universe in six days or six eons.