Almost every tradition that reflected on the origin of the world reached for light to describe it. In the Hebrew scriptures the first act of creation is the calling of light out of darkness — “let there be light” — and light is named good before anything else is made. In the philosophy of Neoplatonism, all of reality flows outward from a single source, the One, in a process likened to light radiating from the sun: each level of being an emanation, fainter the further it falls from the source, yet still partaking of its brightness. Light became the standing metaphor for the divine intellect, for goodness, and for the act of creation itself — that which makes things visible, and in making them visible, in some sense makes them be.
Where light is made a first principle, a second principle almost always rises to meet it: darkness. The most thoroughgoing expression of this belongs to the religions of ancient Persia and their heirs. In Zoroastrianism, the cosmos is the battleground of two opposed spirits — Ahura Mazda, the Wise Lord, the source of light and order, set against Angra Mainyu, the spirit of darkness and chaos. The whole of history is the working-out of their conflict.
This dualism passed into Manichaeism, the great religion of light founded by the prophet Mani in the third century, which framed all existence as two co-eternal realms: the Kingdom of Light and the Kingdom of Darkness. In the Manichaean myth, particles of light became entangled in matter and darkness, and the purpose of creation is the slow work of freeing the light and returning it to its source. A parallel vision runs through Gnosticism, whose highest reality is the Pleroma — the “fullness,” a realm of light, harmony, and spiritual perfection from which all divine beings emanate, and which is the soul's true home. The Gnostic light-realm is populated by luminous powers that descend, illuminate, and draw the lost back towards the light. It is this family of ideas — light as a living, active, creative principle, eternally distinguished from the dark — that stands behind the conception of Aetherius.
Among the names Aetherius bears is Ptah, drawn from the creator-god of the Egyptian city of Memphis. Ptah was among the oldest gods of Egypt and, in the theology of Memphis preserved on the Shabaka Stone, the supreme creator — titled the “Begetter of the First Beginning.” What set Ptah apart from other creator-gods was his method. Where others made the world through physical act, Ptah created it through thought and word: he conceived the world in his heart and brought it into being by speaking it with his tongue. Creation, in the Memphite vision, was an act of mind and language — intention given form through the power of the word.
Ptah was also the master craftsman, the patron of artisans, builders, and architects — the god through whom design becomes substance. The pairing is exact: conception and craft, the word that plans and the hand that makes. It is a fitting second name for a principle whose nature is creation itself, and whose creative power, as the universe tells it, expresses itself through two complementary faculties — the linear power of thought and language, and the spatial power of imagination and skill.
Aetherius is one pole of the cosmology of creation. For its counterpart, see Pandemonius, the principle of Dark; for the avatars through which it acts, Creators; and for the wider structure of the convergence, the entries of the Cosmology archive.
