THE GNOSTIC MATRIX

A GNOSTIC INSIGHT ON THE MATRIX


For Matrix fans, the movie might best be explained in Gnostic terms and the allied field of Jungian depth psychology. I know that’s a mouthful so I’ll try not to get any more technical.

The central premise of the ancient Gnostic tradition is that the world was created by the forces of a flawed, jealous creator god synonymous with Jehovah of the Old Testament. This was in distinction to the One True God of love who emanated all things. The problem was that like a video tape, each successive copy or emanation fom God diluted in light and clarity. Another way of saying this is that the further these spiritual beings were from the Source (God), the more shadow or ignorance they contained.

It was through a result of this degradative process that the creator god and his material creation came into existence. The material cosmos had to be separated from heaven because their natures or energies were incompatible, but not before souls of the light were trapped within the world sphere (a greatly abbreviated version of the Gnostic myth here). The creator god, being limited but thinking he was the genesis of all things (“I am God, and there are no other god’s before me”), created a flawed world that operated mechanistically with mathematical precision, not according to spiritual laws.

This god formed the human body, but could not animate it owing to his lack of real divine force. Humans were animated by the activity of the Holy Spirit, the serpent in the Garden of Eden, who imbued the fleshly creature with conscious awareness. The human body henceforth became the abode of the trapped souls of light. The Holy Spirit was one of two prime forces seeking to free the trapped sparks of divine light lying dormant in the human soul. The other was the Christ Spirit representing the masculine force of God as the Holy Spirit was God's female essence.

With this background summary, let’s look at the Matrix trilogy.


THE ARCHITECT— is the flawed creator god. He created what he deemed to be the perfect artificial program (the Matrix) only to have humans mess it up with free will (choice). That’s his perspective. He wanted humans to live in an unconscious state (ignorance is bliss) where their divine essence would forever slumber in an illusion of his making (the Garden of Eden) wherefrom he derived worship, energy and power over his creation.

THE MACHINES/MACHINE WORLD—The machines seem to be a creation of humans, but are really a creation of the Architect by extension through humans. The Architect is about mechanistic, mathematical precision and crafting artificial worlds. The machines are a result of this vision being artificial intelligence. Machines further divorce us from true nature. Machine consciousness is therefore an extension of the Architect's consciousness, a way to further deviate humans from reality (their connection with the divine). This artificial way of perceiving seeps into the subconscious human psyche and emerges as erroneous reflex responses to reality. Notice how the sentinels resemble human T-cells always swarming to attack a foreign substance? Here the foreign substance is the free humans who are truly alien to the whole artificial construct of the world. The machine world is the super computer running the Matrix program functioning in the “real” world, which in itself is still an illusion (see comments on the Source below).

THE AGENTS-- are just programs meant to keep order within the Matrix, the equivalent of the Gnostic Archons or forces that retard human awareness.

THE ORACLE—is the Holy Spirit. One point here. The oracle claims to be a program and so would therefore be a creation of the Architect. However, at the end of Revolutions, the oracle and the architect have a conversation that clearly indicates she is in no way subservient to the architect. How to reconcile this? In Gnostic mythology, an aspect of the Holy Spirit stays trapped within the creation to guide the human souls back to the True God. She is no servant of the architect, but rather works through his playing field to upset his "balance" and liberate the divine sparks . She does this by facilitating and assisting them in raising their consciousness to dispel their illusions and perceive reality.

NEO— is the Christ. HE IS ANYTHING BUT A PROGRAM as some have suggested. He is a human whose spirit derives from the Source and like all humans, he reincarnates until he achieves sufficient purity of consciousness to break both with the Matrix and the machine dominance. He is sent by the Source to lead the souls out of the illusory trap of materiality, but he must evolve through matter by suffering and enduring all the forces of illusion until he can overcome materiality's hypnotic pull, which he does by the trilogy’s end.

TRINITY— is Mary Magdalene. In Gnosticism, Mary played a triple role— earthly manifestation of the Holy Spirit, companion of and compliment to the savior, and embodiment of God’s love. The two became one in Jesus and Magdalene as it did in Neo and Trinity, i.e. the masculine and feminine divine aspects reunited into their primordial unity— heart and mind, logic and intuition, strength and mercy.

MORPHEUS— John the Baptist, prophet and forerunner of the Christ (Neo).

SMITH— is Neo, Neo and Smith are us (humanity). Smith starts off as an agent, but after fusing with Neo he breaks with his program. Smith is our unconscious shadow, the destructive, irrational force harboring hatred, fear, and self-loathing, all being emotions that spread like a virus. Neo is the light side of us longing to be free of such forces and reunite with the Source. They are two sides of the same coin, Christ and anti-Christ, god and devil, angel and demon. But notice that good is destined to triumph. On the two occasions they fuse, it is Smith who transforms, not Neo. Neo does not succumb to the destructive forces, but Smith absorbs Neo's free will, though he is the side of us that misuses it, the ego run rampant who emulates the architect by saying ‘this is my world” as if he were a real creator.

THE LIBERATION-- In the end, Smith, Neo and the oracle have merged and they annhilate one another. They have overcome the illusion of duality (good/evil; spirit/matter). They are reabsorbed into the actual unity that they are, that we are. The Holy Spirit remains in the world sphere as the oracle to continue liberating the souls desiring to be freed through the gate Neo has opened, the breach he created in the prison walls of the Matrix and the architect. This is what Gnostic Christians believed the Christ did.

THE SOURCE— the Source is mentioned several times, particularly by the oracle, but it is nebulous in most people’s minds. I really haven’t seen a cogent interpretation of the Source in any forums. Some people confuse it with the architect or the machine world mainframe, and certain things in the films reinforce this, but that's another delusion.

Here's the key question-- where is God in all this? It is certainly not the architect. The oracle tells us more than once how limited he is, and what kind of god creates such a world as the Matrix anyway? It is not the machine mainframe. As powerful as that is, it's just a created artifical intelligence, a super-computer.

The Source is the True God that stands above all. We get a glimpse of it in Revolutions as Neo and Trinity try to breach the machine city. They can’t withstand the attack of the sentinels. Neo says there are too many of them, they need to “go up.” They ascend through the smog of the created cosmos and emerge into the light of a bright sun-filled sky where Trinity gazes in awe. This scene is an allegory of how we need God’s grace to overcome the mechanistic world of illusion and transcend beyond its hypnotic hold on us. This is the most important scene in the film, and I never see it mentioned by anyone.

There is no one correct interpretation of the Matrix just as there is no single interpretation of life. Just see if this vector on the story rings true to you.