(1) Western concepts of God have ranged from the detached transcendent demiurge of Aristotle to the pantheism of Spinoza.(2) Call it the demiurge cycle, after the Gnostic notion that our world is governed by a mad ersatz God.(3) Gnosticism says that there is a good God, but that God is not responsible for the mess we endure, which is the creation of a demiurge or evil god.(4) A certain mystique attached to the word as a result of analogies often drawn between the creative activity of the artist and the creation of the world by the deity or by a Platonic demiurge in accordance with Ideas or prototypes.(5) Interwoven with these references to an almost Platonic demiurge are appeals to the selecting power of an active u2018Natureu2019.(6) The Gnostics thought that the God worshiped by most Christians was a demiurge or usurper.(7) Gnostic teaching distinguished between a perfect and remote divine being and an imperfect demiurge who had created suffering.(8) Man is occasionally represented as having been framed out of a piece of the body of the Creator, or made by some demiurgic potter out of clay.(9) It is easy to be impressed with our demiurgical abilities and to believe we can mold digital technology however we desire.(10) Barney's demiurgical universe of the nearly normal and utterly bizarre makes viewers anxious for more.(11) But the tree of life becomes a vehicle of bondage and dependence established by the demiurgical realm.(12) Pluto is an intellectual demiurgic god, who frees souls from generation.(13) The first triad of these gods is demiurgic ; the second, defensive; the third, vivific; and the fourth, elevating and harmonic.(14) He is here just a trace-copyist, a technician without a smudge of demiurgic imagination.(15) Literary historians are fond of abundantly demiurgical years in a poet's career, particularly the last years before an untimely death, such as those of John Keats and Wilfred Owen.(16) By contrast, the world we inhabit was created by a lesser, demiurgical being, and is nothing more than a rough, asymmetrical copy of the u2018realu2019 world.
