Open Veils · Answer
In the end... what is "come back to the pleoma" means?!
To 'return to the Pleroma' is the central soteriological goal of Gnostic cosmology — the re-absorption of the imprisoned divine spark back into the totality of divine being from which it fell. It is not a journey to a new location but the dissolution of the illusion of separation. Elaine Pagels, in her work on the Nag Hammadi texts, frames this as the recovery of original divine identity — gnosis as the mechanism, reunion as the destination. The question is not where you go, but what veil drops.
Evidence
- According to Valentinian Gnostic teaching, as preserved in the Excerpts from Theodotus and analyzed by Elaine Pagels, the Pleroma is the primordial divine Fullness — a realm of paired Aeons (divine emanations) existing in perfect syzygial union before any fragmentation occurred.
- The Valentinian path — detailed in texts like the Gospel of Philip and the Gospel of Truth — teaches that the pneumatic soul must acquire gnosis: self-knowledge as divine-knowledge, recognition that the self is not the material husk or the psychic ego but the spark itself.
- Rupert Sheldrake's morphic resonance framework, and separately Tom Campbell's My Big TOE, offer secular-adjacent models where consciousness returns to a larger information system — functionally echoing what the Gnostics mapped mythologically.
- The Hermetic tradition, as Manly P. Hall documents in The Secret Teachings of All Ages, places the same endpoint differently: the soul ascends through the Ogdoad — beyond the seven planetary spheres — and 'enters into God.'
- The drama of existence begins when Sophia, the outermost Aeon, acts outside this union and her desire precipitates a 'fall' — generating the Demiurge and the material cosmos as a kind of cosmic wound.