Supernatural creature of the week: Abraxas

A demon in some legends and a Pagan God in others, this week’s Supernatural creature of the week is Abraxas.

Caution: There are spoilers from Supernatural Season 14, Episode 11 in this post. You’ve been warned.

Let me start out by saying that Supernatural wasted a perfectly good villain tonight. Seriously, Nick went on this long quest to find Abraxas and when he finally did, they tough-talk him for a bit then end up killing him in under 10 minutes! After building him up for at least three episodes, he only appears for one scene. He was like a mix between Yellow Eyes and Alastair, they should have kept him on longer.

So, even though Abraxas died pretty quickly, there was no question about whether he was a high-ranking demon or not. The fact that he was taking kill orders from Lucifer himself implies he was high on the food chain, and that Mary could only stop him by locking him in a box, says how powerful he was. He’s a demon on the show but is much more in myth.

Also known as Abracax, Abraxas started out as a deity of great sagacity, but modern times consider him to either be an entity of pain or a new age type of coexisting God. History has a tough time deciding on what he is. Often described as having the head of a bird, normally a rooster, a lizard-like crest behind his head and writhing vipers for legs. His torso resembles a human man wielding a flail and a shield. In some versions, the flail is replaced by a forked whip.

In truth, Abraxas’s origins are impossible to pinpoint, history is hard enough to accurately trace, but in this case, it’s an unbeatable quest. Somewhere down the line, things went haywire and Abraxas flipped the chess board. Whereas once he was considered a wise God, the Christians condemned his worshipers to be heretics and renamed him a demonic force.

Many throughout history have seen Abraxas as an incarnation of both Good and Evil, opposing forces brought together into a single entity. He’s since represented a version of God that isn’t separate from the Devil; a symbol of coexistence.

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He can also symbolize the union of male and female fundamentals, through his male appearance and the serpents on his legs which are symbolic to the Goddesses Isis and Demeter. Also, the snake in India represents the Shakti, a female energy.

Origin of the name and Gnosticism

Before Abraxas was a name, it was a word of mystic meaning used in Gnosticism. Made of Greek letters believed to have magical properties, it was engraved on amulets and on certain gemstones, appropriately dubbed Abraxas stones. The word is found in Gnostic texts such as the Holy Book of the Great Invisible Spirit, and in the Greek Magical Papyri.

In the second century, the early Gnostics used the word to name their Supreme Deity. Basilides, an early Gnostic teacher from Alexandria, Egypt, gave the name to the Great Archon, the God of the 365 heavens, one for each day of the year. The numerical equivalent of the spelling has seven letters that equal 365 in both the Greek and Hebrew language.

Historians claim the seven letters in the name represents the seven classic planets: Sun, Moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. According to Basilides, Abraxas created Mind, Word, Providence, Virtue, and Wisdom, and out of these, the Principalities, Powers, Angels, and the 365 heavens were created.

The Supreme Deity is both light and darkness bonded together, the union of all things. From Basilides’s Appendix of Tertullian’s De praescriptione haereticorum;

"Afterwards broke out the heretic Basilides. He affirms that there is a supreme Deity, by name Abraxas, by whom was created Mind, which in Greek he calls Nous; that thence sprang the Word; that of Him issued Providence, Virtue, and Wisdom; that out of these subsequently were made Principalities, powers, and Angels; that there ensued infinite issues and processions of angels; that by these angels 365 heavens were formed, and the world, in honour of Abraxas, whose name, if computed, has in itself this number."

Centuries later the Catholic church deemed Abraxas a Pagan God and categorized him as a demon. In J. Collin de Plancy’s book, Infernal Dictionary, it’s explained that Abraxas is labeled the “supreme God” of the Basilidians, whom Plancy describes as “heretics of the second century.” Anything they worshiped was considered heresy to the Christian faith.

On a more cheery note, here’s a fun fact. Remember those days when birthday parties had a magician pulling rabbits out of their hats after they said the magic word? We have Abraxas to thank for that because in a twist of paradoxical irony, Abraxas is the root of the popular magic word “Abracadabra.”

Before it was used by magicians, Abracadabra was a Persian and Syrian word of enchantment used for medical treatments. The word was written in a triangular arrangement and worn around physicians’ necks.

Egyptian God and demon

One of the first cultures to name Abraxas as a demon were The Egyptians, although they also believed him to be a type of sun God with the head of a king and serpents for feet. It’s from Ancient Egypt where the demon/god was adopted by Jewish mythology and then later by the Gnostic Christians.

Abraxas was also a God in an area of Ancient Greece, in an Egyptian built kingdom located in Thebes where Jupiter was proclaimed ruler of all things. As mentioned above, Abraxas’ numerical name is equivalent to the number 365, which is the same number of days in which Jupiter rules the heavens. This connection made Abraxas and Jupiter (which is also spelled with seven letters) one in the same.

Carl Jung

The founder of analytical psychology, Carl Jung, used Abraxas in his representation of the driving force of individualism when a person reaches their full maturity level. Described as a three-stage development, the first stage is to recognize that God appears undifferentiated, the second stage is the perception of a benevolent Lord and the Devil, and the third stage is the integration of the Lord and the Devil.

In his book, The Seven Sermons to the Dead published in 1916, Jung claims Abraxas is a Being, higher than the Christian God and Devil, that is able to combine all opposites into one unified spirit. His theory is that, like Abraxas, an individual must be one whole instead of one half.

"Abraxas is the sun, and at the same time the eternally sucking gorge of the void, the belittling and dismembering devil.The power of Abraxas is twofold; but ye see it not, because for your eyes the warring opposites of this power are extinguished."

Supernatural took the easy road and just made him a demon, though they could have made him anything.

Catch the next episode of Supernatural next Thursday at 8:00 p.m. on the CW.