Gnostic Lost
Via Ram comes this post from a site I’m sad to only now be discovering, which points out some very juicy tidbits from Gnostic myth just waiting to be plucked and half-baked into a Lost theory pie (how’s that for carrying the metaphor just a touch too long, yet falling short of comparing the Tree Of Knowledge to the magic light cave, thankfully for all involved):
In Gnostic mythos, God is living energy — pure spiritual light — a tiny spark of which burns inside each of us. Occasionally, this divine light produces avatars of human form, one of whom was Jesus. Another was Sophia, an expression of the divine feminine. Sophia became estranged from God and tried to cure her loneliness by creating a son. But something went terribly wrong, and she gave birth to Demiurge, a being of pure evil with many names, including Satan and Samuel.
Dude, where are you going? I haven’t even gone to Wikipedia myself yet. Here it goes:
Gnosticism presents a distinction between a supranatural, unknowable reality and the sensible materiality of which the demiurge is creator … several systems of Gnostic thought present the Demiurge as antagonistic to the Supreme God: his act of creation either in unconscious and fundamentally flawed imitation of the divine model, or else formed with the malevolent intention of entrapping aspects of the divine in materiality.
Boom! I was already thinking about Buddhism in the context of the alternaverse, especially after the last ep where Desmond thought Ana-Lucia “not ready yet,” i.e. not enlightened, not aware of the true reality that lies behind the apparent reality. But move over Siddhartha, time for Sammy McSmoke to drop some Gnosis on that ass.
There’s the idea that some of the pre-crash discrepancies in the Alternaverse could theoretically be attributed to Jacob not having intervened in the lives of the candidates. Also, that when Smokey promises people things “when he gets off the island”, they are things that are true in the sideways world. So then the sideways world is the Smokeyverse, the world that Smokey made by eliminating the island and preventing Jacob from having intervened in said world.
It’s a perfectly serviceable Lost theory. It’ll do until tomorrow.