dChan
Anonymous ID: 29aa24 Aug. 15, 2020, 11:26 a.m. No.10298753   🗄️.is 🔗kun

>>10298697

 

ARCHON Ἄρχων

I. The term archōn, a participial form of the verb archein used as a substantive, carries the root meaning of primacy in time or rank. After the overthrow of the monarchies in the Greek city-states (ca. 650 BCE), the term archōn, meaning ‘high official’ or ‘chief magistrate’, became widely used for a variety of high public officials. Originally it was primarily limited as a designation for the highest officials (Thucydides 1.126; Aristotle Ath. Pol. 13, 10–12). A typical Greek polis had two or more magistrates (archontes), a council (boulē) and an assembly of the people (dēmos); see Josephus Ant. 14.190; 16.172. Public and private leadership terms formulated with the prefix arch-were extremely common in the Hellenistic period. During the late Hellenistic and early Roman period the term archōn, in both singular and plural forms, began to be used in early Judaism and early Christianity and then in Neoplatonism and Gnosticism as designation for supernatural beings such as →angels, →demons and →Satan and planetary deities who were thought to occupy a particular rank in a hierarchy of supernatural beings analogous to a political or military structure.

II. There was a widespread notion in the ancient world that the planets either were deities or were presided over by deities, a view which probably originated in Babylonia and involved astral fatalism. Philo refers to the popular conception that the →Sun, →Moon and →Stars were gods, but he argues that →Moses regarded the heavenly bodies as archontes, governing those beings which exist below the moon, in the air or on the →Earth (De spec. leg. 1.13–14). The term kosmokratores was also used of the planets, personified as rulers of the heavenly spheres (a term used with some frequency later in the Greek magical papyri). While these supernatural beings were not unambiguously regarded as either good or evil, there was a strong tendency to regard them as hostile if not evil.

The Neoplatonist Iamblichus (ca. 250–325 CE), dependent on Babylonian-Chaldaean astrology, perhaps as mediated by a lost work called Hyphegetica by Julian the Theurgist, posited a hierarchy of supernatural beings between God and the soul: →Archangels, angels, demons, two kinds of archons, heroes and souls. The two types of archons, which function only in the sublunar region, included cosmic archons, kosmokratores, and hylic archons, tēs hylēs parestēkotes (Iamblichus, De myst. 2.3.71). It is significant that the archontes of Iamblichus are much lower on the hierarchy of being than archangels and angels.