The program of this piece is Gnosticism, although the threatening quality of the music would make it ideal piece to add thrills to a band’s Halloween concert.

The earliest Christians were influenced by many other systems of belief than the Old Testament of the Jews. Long before the Nicene Creed attempted to standardize Christian thought, many Christian sects remained influenced by the beliefs of the Greeks. Beliefs borrowed from Mithraism, which was popular among the Romans, and Platonism combined with the cult of Jesus to form Gnostic Christianity, which held that YHWH, the Supreme Being (the concept of the Trinity had yet to be devised), was not the creator of the universe. The material world was instead created by a lesser god, the Demiurge, whose mother was Sophia. The Demiurge, while not Satanic, had a personality disorder (or, he may have been bipolar), and the universe he created was thus dreadfully flawed. We poor mortals suffer as a result of his incompetence and mischief.