Abraxus Busts the Dialectic Bracket

I'm not asserting interpolation is for the flabby-minded. Most people consider themselves on pretty solid ground, phenomenologically speaking, if they stay squarely within the parameters of what it is acceptable to believe. That's also been a standard working definition of sanity for most of human history. Believe approximately what everyone around you believes and you're sane. Deviate far enough from that consensus and you're unsane.

The difficulty is that consensus has a terrible historical record.

Abraxus

Entire civilizations have been absolutely certain about things later civilizations regarded as absurd. Gods lived on particular mountains. Kings possessed divine blood. Illness could be caused by witchcraft. The position of the planets governed human affairs. The dead required specific objects in their graves. Heresy could contaminate a community. The universe revolved around the Earth. These weren't necessarily fringe ideas held by eccentrics standing on street corners. They were often the respectable intellectual furniture of their societies.

Which raises an uncomfortable question: what if barely anything we've put inside our own brackets of acceptable belief turns out to be true?

Then what?

The obvious answer is that reality doesn't care very much about our brackets.

Human beings have always had to construct models of reality from incomplete information. Most of the time this works remarkably well. You don't need to understand quantum mechanics to avoid walking into traffic. But practical usefulness isn't the same thing as ultimate truth. A map can get you home while being profoundly incomplete about the territory.

Religion is one of the oldest places where human beings have tried to draw that map.

One particularly strange figure lurking around the margins of Western religious history is Abraxas, a name associated with certain Gnostic traditions of the early centuries of the Common Era. Abraxas appears on ancient magical gems and in accounts of religious systems later condemned as heretical. The surviving evidence is fragmentary, and much of what we know about Gnostic groups comes from their opponents, so it's wise not to pretend there was ever one universally agreed-upon theology of Abraxas.

But the idea that eventually accumulated around the name is fascinating.

Abraxas is sometimes imagined not simply as a good god opposed by an evil power, but as a being encompassing or transcending opposites. Good and evil, creation and destruction, divine and demonic become categories existing beneath it rather than laws governing it.

That is a very different creature from the loving personal God familiar from much of Christianity.

It also resembles one of the recurring nightmares of religious philosophy: what if the being responsible for creating the material world isn't particularly interested in us?

Certain Gnostic systems pushed the idea much further. They distinguished between a transcendent, unknowable divine reality and a lesser creator—the Demiurge—responsible for fashioning the material cosmos. Depending on the system, this creator might be ignorant, arrogant, defective or actively hostile. The physical universe therefore wasn't necessarily evidence of a perfectly benevolent designer. It could be a prison, an accident, a counterfeit or the work of a cosmic bureaucrat who mistakenly believes himself supreme.

That's a profoundly disturbing inversion of conventional theology.

Instead of asking why a good God permits suffering, it asks whether goodness was ever part of the construction contract.

Related attempts to explain the existence of evil appear elsewhere, although they shouldn't all be collapsed into Gnosticism. Zoroastrianism developed an extraordinarily influential cosmic opposition between beneficent and destructive forces. Ancient Hebrew and later Jewish traditions wrestled in different ways with divine justice, adversarial beings, catastrophe and the apparent indifference of the universe. Christianity inherited many of those questions and spent centuries trying to reconcile an omnipotent, omniscient and benevolent God with a world where children die, earthquakes bury cities and predators begin eating their prey before it is dead.

The theological term is theodicy.

The less polite formulation is: explain this mess.

Abraxas becomes interesting precisely because the figure seems to refuse the question.

Perhaps creation isn't good.

Perhaps creation isn't evil.

Perhaps those are human categories being projected onto something operating at a scale where they no longer apply.

A hurricane isn't evil. A supernova isn't evil. A parasitic wasp isn't evil. A cancer cell isn't evil. Those judgments arise when conscious beings encounter events that help or harm them. From our position inside the system, the distinction matters enormously. From the standpoint of the universe itself, there may be no distinction at all.

Centuries later, Carl Jung seized upon Abraxas for exactly this reason. In Seven Sermons to the Dead, Abraxas becomes a symbol of something beyond the comfortable division between God and Devil—a frightening totality containing creation and destruction, light and darkness, rather than choosing one side.

That version of Abraxas may tell us more about Jung than about the ancient Gnostics, but that's almost beside the point.

Symbols survive because people continue finding uses for them.

Like Baphomet—another figure whose modern meaning is an accumulation of history, occultism, reinterpretation and myth—Abraxas has become more than whatever the name originally meant. It has become a container for an unsettling possibility: that reality might not organize itself according to human moral categories.

And this brings us back to sanity.

Every culture draws a circle around the things a reasonable person is permitted to believe. Most of those boundaries are useful. Some are essential. Without shared assumptions, people couldn't build bridges, practice medicine, conduct experiments or agree that the bus arriving at the corner is in fact a bus.

But consensus and truth remain different things.

The history of ideas is littered with propositions that once sounded insane and later became ordinary, alongside countless propositions that once sounded perfectly reasonable and eventually became ridiculous.

So I'm reluctant to confuse staying inside the brackets with knowing what is actually there.

The universe is under no obligation to resemble the version of it human beings currently find acceptable.

And if something like Abraxas were waiting outside those brackets—neither loving us nor hating us, neither benevolent nor malicious, simply responsible for the machinery being here in the first place—I'm not sure we'd even possess the conceptual equipment necessary to recognize it.

We'd probably call it impossible.

Until it wasn't.