its a pretty interesting worldview. it features a supreme god, the Monad, who is fairly disconnected from the physical world but has emanations, Aeons, that affect the world (e.g. Jesus). then there is the Demiurge, sometimes presented as evil, sometimes as more neutral. the Demiurge created the physical world and the physical aspects of humanity, trapping our souls and preventing us from reuniting with the Monad. the Demiurge creates Archons to assist in maintaining the physical world and preventing souls from ascending. calling it a heresy is a bit reductive since it formed before Orthodox Christianity had fully materialized. Gnosticism was actually somewhat of an orthodoxy before the Orthodoxy

that being said, it has nothing to do with Marxism. it does have something to do with TES, since it seems some of the TES lore surrounding deities is influenced by Gnosticism

In the 1950s, a German-American academic named Eric Voegelin proposed a theory equating Communism and Nazism by referring to the early Christian heresy of Gnosticism. At the time, there were basically no sources about Gnosticism save for some Christian saints writing about how evil it all is. So Voegelin took some vague characteristics those church fathers complained about, like believing that the real world is fundamentally wrong and a better world has to come about, and drew some analogies with both Communism and Nazism to propose that they’re both at heart Gnosticism. This was then taken up by William F. Buckley, who used it as a sort of anti-Communist sledgehammer (that’s where the slogan “Don’t immanentize the eschaton [i.e. the end of the world]” comes from, if you’ve ever heard that). You still find this idea occasionally in the writings of old conservatives, like the musicologist Carolyn Abbate for instance, but the discovery of real Gnostic texts a few decades ago and the end of the Cold War really put a damper on it. I’m surprised to see that some online conspiracy theorists still honor the classics.

“Gnostic” religim refers to a Greek tradition where you have to learn some secret thing to transcend this reality and make your way to the true reality. It fused with Christianity and became a popular minority until after the persecution, when the majority of Christian sects agreed it was heretical. Interestingly, there were a lot of batshit crazy gnostic beliefs, including some forms that ate semen as communion, but the main sticking point between Gnostic Christians and other Christians was whether Jesus was true God and True man. Gnostics didn’t belive that someone of truth like Jesus would allow a falsehood like a physical body to restrain him, so they said his form and death were just illusions.

Anyway, Gnosticism can be understood as a strange form of dualism that emerged during the period of hellenistic kingdoms, so between Alexander the Great and Roman conquest of Greece. The belief in hidden knowledge is similar to the mystery cults of ancient Greek religion and to the Orphic Hymns, but the main difference is that Gnostics believed the material world was entirely false and evil.

Pagan satan atheist bad