>>236009Okay I have put something together
TBH I dunno if it exactly relates to the idea I had in mind, I think I thought something like certain ancient people had this idea of a false god imposed on them and that strongly relates it to the Gnostic Demiurge (the malevolent Yaldabaoth)
I have two angles:
1) Mesopotamia - as expressed here www.researchgate.net/publication/233594844_Manichaeism_and_Ancient_Mesopotamian_Gnosticism allegedly Gnostic tales mirror Ancient Mesopotamian myths a lot. While it may look a bit generic, I do find that the idea of the fall of the soul (spirit trapped in matter) must have been adopted by Gnostic thought more or less directly
2) Egypt - this is closer to what I had in mind I guess - from Wikipedia:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yaldabaoth
>After the Assyrian conquest of Egypt during the 7th century BCE, Seth was considered an evil deity by the Egyptians and not commonly worshipped, in large part due to his role as the god of foreigners.[15] (read the 15-footnote too)That is about the emerging narrative of associating Seth (chaos, foreign god) with Yahweh - the legitimate creator God of the Jews
>From at least 200 BCE onward, a tradition developed in the Graeco-Egyptian Ptolemaic Kingdom which identified Yahweh, the God of the Jews, with the Egyptian god SethWhile the exact narrative perhaps doesn't predate Plato and other sources you mentioned, Seth's fall from glory does.
Though perhaps I wasn't referring to anything concrete anyway, more like to the whole existential idea of falsehood and evilness of god - the god revered by some and hated by others, the Demiurge, the god imposed on others - apparently that was relatively common, and that in turn shaped the myth. Anyway, the whole Seth-Osiris myth looks a bit similar as well, like killing Osiris and separating his body into pieces (soul pieces?) for them later to be reassembled (returned to Pleroma) or something.
Perhaps that is stretching it a bit too far but this is good enough for me TBH. I concur that the Greek thought probably gave the most structure to it all, I just want to state that they didn't made that shit up, more like they reinterpreted it.
>unless you count egypt, but thats not fairIt is fair, because those ideas likely influenced what Hellenistic (or perhaps even more ancient) Greeks worked with. Well, I have already outlined the idea - like, it's nothing as strong (elaborately complete) as Plato's Timaeus but I find it closely related.