J.T. Wilson > Recent Status Updates

In which Sophia and Ialdaboath become Achamōth and The Demiurge, and the material world is made exclusively out of misery.

“The following passage (not translated here) is a polemic by St Irenaeus” appears quite a lot, I think the saint might have been quite rude.

The book was becoming quite repetitive with scarcely preserved fragments of variants of the same (confusing and opaque) myths. Into Valentinus now.

Looks like we might be moving past the Nag Hammadi Library, at least for a while, which is good because it was getting to the point where the documents (already hard to follow even when completely preserved) were so damaged that the meaning was incomprehensible.

‘The Hypostatis of the Archons’ and ‘First Thought in Three Forms’ (great name for a debut EP with three tracks), plus the ‘Egyptian Gospel’.

Gnostic cosmogony is really interesting but also really hard to follow; even the three-in-one God of canonical Christianity is less obscure than this space opera.

Coming out of the gate hot with the Secret Book According To John (an alternative Genesis with some wild cosmology) and the Gospel Of Judas. Not yet at the Hypostatis of the Archons which is why I came here.

(Some of the text, having been written on scrolls hidden in a desert for millennia, is so dilapidated that when one bit says that the disciples are “lost for words” this also applies to the text itself)

The Louis XI chapter went on forever before it finally remembered it was taking place 85% of the way into the novel and might need to progress the flipping plot.

Hugo’s imagination is so vivid (unfortunately this extends to imagining anyone will be interested in his long rambling non-fiction chapters, but this is two sides of the same coin).

This sort of feels like I should have read it at the same time as Dracula, Frankenstein, Phantom etc, but I also think I would have found the 35 pages of digression infuriating. Like Gulliver, or Treasure Island, it’s a book whose adaptations make you think “kids’ book?” and yet it’s hard to imagine kids actually enjoying it.

My plot has finally hit fifth gear and Gringoire has met Esmerelda in the Court of Miracles. That’s when I hit them with the two chapters of description of Notre Dame’s architecture,

Took a while to get going, but the hero has finally arrived.

(Practically speaking, very close to finishing as most of the rest is notes and sources)

Tom Cruise also thought Battlefield Earth was a dud

(Actually more like start of act 3; there’s 50-60 pages of notes)

This is research, rather than fun, so it is creatively inspiring rather than an inspiring story of positivity.

It seems like a real stretch to suggest (or at least infer) that sieg heil-arious 80s bands you’ve never heard of (Sol Invictus, Current 93) are somehow important to young fascists who want to do their yoga in a far right way in 2026.

More likely that they are important to, for example, Home settling old scores by calling some enemies’ music crap.

This author has skulked around the outskirts of some of my interests for a while, but this is the first of his I’ve come to.