In the first century Epicureanism is still popular, which claimed the cosmos and man had arisen from atoms and natural laws including survival of the fittest only, and that because the soul depends on the body it would die.
This group took those ideas as a foundation and added on top Plato’s demiurge (an eventual creator of worlds) and his idea of eikons (images of a physical object) in order to claim that the soul may not be dependent on a physical body - because there may not be a physical body at all, just the eikon of a body and a physical cosmos.
As Epicureanism falls from popularity in the 2nd century and Platonism/Neoplatonism becomes more popular, the paradigm flips to embrace Plato’s theory of eidos (pure spiritual forms which precede corrupt physical versions). So it becomes a pure spiritual realm first, which a corrupt demiurge traps in a corrupted physical world. This is what’s typically referred to as Gnosticism.
Which is pretty dramatically different from the idea that there was a spontaneous original humanity in a world fashioned from atoms randomly scattered which brings forth a demiurge to recreate itself in non-physical form - not as a corrupt trap but as a mechanism of resurrection and afterlife.
If you want to find out more, I’d recommend reading Leucretius’s De Rerum Natura first so you are familiar with the concepts, particularly its language referring to atoms as ‘seeds,’ and then reading the two surviving primary sources on this group directly: The Gospel of Thomas (“good news of the twin”) and book 5 of Pseudo-Hippolytus’s Refutations on the Naassenes (the only group recorded as explicitly following the former work).
Interesting. Any links or search terms to go about finding more about this ancient belief system?
Ah, this is Gnosticism. Super interesting and weird belief system.
It’s not. It’s proto-Gnosticism.
In the first century Epicureanism is still popular, which claimed the cosmos and man had arisen from atoms and natural laws including survival of the fittest only, and that because the soul depends on the body it would die.
This group took those ideas as a foundation and added on top Plato’s demiurge (an eventual creator of worlds) and his idea of eikons (images of a physical object) in order to claim that the soul may not be dependent on a physical body - because there may not be a physical body at all, just the eikon of a body and a physical cosmos.
As Epicureanism falls from popularity in the 2nd century and Platonism/Neoplatonism becomes more popular, the paradigm flips to embrace Plato’s theory of eidos (pure spiritual forms which precede corrupt physical versions). So it becomes a pure spiritual realm first, which a corrupt demiurge traps in a corrupted physical world. This is what’s typically referred to as Gnosticism.
Which is pretty dramatically different from the idea that there was a spontaneous original humanity in a world fashioned from atoms randomly scattered which brings forth a demiurge to recreate itself in non-physical form - not as a corrupt trap but as a mechanism of resurrection and afterlife.
If you want to find out more, I’d recommend reading Leucretius’s De Rerum Natura first so you are familiar with the concepts, particularly its language referring to atoms as ‘seeds,’ and then reading the two surviving primary sources on this group directly: The Gospel of Thomas (“good news of the twin”) and book 5 of Pseudo-Hippolytus’s Refutations on the Naassenes (the only group recorded as explicitly following the former work).