"We Know The Devil": The Demonic Feminine
A dive into a personal fave in the context of the Gnostic myth of Sofia
Content warnings:
discussions of Christianity and Christian/religious trauma, mentions of “sin”;
discussions of homophobia and transphobia with focus on religious bigotry;
mention of misgendering (very brief), alussions to bodily/gender dysphoria;
references to misogyny;
mentions of anti-Semitism and the alt-right;
eye imagery;
existentially troubling concepts; Demiurge myth.
Note: As I give an overview of Gnosticism as a religion/school of thought, I touch up on the incredibly sensitive topic of its relationship with Judaism and the history of Christianity’s separation from the latter. I will try my best to be honest and conscientious in the process, but if the topic may be disconcerting to you, please take care.
It’s time for a niche (?) fave! I am so excited }:)
As a little introduction for those not in the know, We Know The Devil is a visual novel set in a Christian camp for “problematic” teens. It follows three main characters, Jupiter, Venus and Neptune, as they navigate their relationship, confront their “sinful” natures and meet the Devil.
The game is a glowing example of incredible narrative design and organic storytelling with impeccably written, poetic and deeply impactful dialogue. If the the themes of religious trauma, misogyny and homo- and transphobia are something you can handle, I strongly recommend you give it a go before reading any further: I am about to start spitting spoilers left and right, and piecing the mechanics and the plot of the novel together on your own is a unique and unforgettable experience.
Spoilers start… now! You have been warned.
The Worst Girls Trio
We Know The Devil’s characters make up Group West, alienated and isolated from the rest of the camp. Each member of the group is rejected on different (yet secretly similar) grounds.
Venus (who, if you play through the game enough times with different routes, is revealed to be a closeted trans girl not yet fully aware of her identity) is a pushover kid who cannot act the way that is expected of her to save her life.
Neptune, a brash young girl objectified by her peers, is shunned for not taking the abuse she faces quietly (and uses her bluntness as a defense, while still withholding her actual feelings and hurt).
Jupiter is a chronic people-pleaser, so terrified of stepping out of line and “ruining” things that she represses her every less-than-desirable urge - which includes her lesbian identity. Unlike the other two, she is actually generally well-liked, but in a way that cannot be internalized as anything other than silent encouragement for her to keep rejecting herself to avoid being rejected by others.
At the start of the game, the three girls are sent away to spend the night in a cabin in the woods where they are meant to “meet the Devil”. From the start, they are deeply disconcerted by the harrowing occasion, yet trying to keep their spirits somewhere above the floor level: “Hardly anyone ever dies!”
As the game progresses, though, the player finds out what Group West has known all along: the Devil is not an external force set to kill or otherwise harm them, but the unconquered “sin” within each of them, raising its head when one of them feels singled out, rejected, left behind. (Oh, Shadow themes, my beloveds.) The greatest thing they have to fear is themselves - the hidden, rejected parts of them, unwanted by everyone around them.
For Jupiter, it is her urge to be an unapologetic presence in the world. That urge is expressed in the need to touch, and for her touch to have the freedom to be openly loving or recklessly hurting.
For Neptune, it is the need to speak openly, find true honesty beyond surface bluntness; to tear through the deception that is anxiously maintained by everyone around her.
For Venus, it is her hunger for self-knowledge, for the chance to truly see herself and to face the light she keeps spotting out of the corner of her eye but never quite looking at directly.
The culmination of We Know The Devil, in every ending, is a meeting with truth. Truth of one’s identity; truth of speaking it into the world and naming it; truth of unrestrained, expressive bodily existence. The girls of Group West represent and are represented by body parts: hand, eye, lung. Hand that can either reach - or flinch away and bury its impulse. Eye that can be wide open - or closed and averted. Lungs that can exhale words of truth - or bury that truth in a person’s chest until they’re choking on it.
There is an interesting intersection with the three Enneagram personality types dominant in Bodily intelligence, too: Type One for Juniper, haunted by the fear of being inherently corrupt; Type Eight for Neptune, avoiding true vulnerability and using bluntness as a substitute; Type Nine for Venys, perpetually preoccupied with denying herself her authenticity out of fear of disturbing the order of the world. All of them are driven by instinct, and the specific expressions of it are ultimately just three faces of the same need for self-preservation. This isn’t that crucial to what we’re discussing, but it’s an interesting additional detail to the game’s narrative of the body, and I thought it was neat!
Once the truth is faced and embraced by the entire group, there is the (un)holy unity of them. Separate and disconnected parts come together in a full-body experience that does not need the safety of denial because it is ultimately self-assured, self-supported, empowered and free. No part needs to be excluded and remain in the dark, no part needs to be denied its freedom - because there is no longer use for plausible deniability. When united, the three transcend their separate physical bodies and turn into something both more powerful and more honest, embracing the metaphysical expressions of their truth and purpose, coded into their very names.
We Know The Devil depicts an astounding experience in spiritual embodiment that simultaneously embraces the physical and represents an existence beyond its limits. And considering how the characters in question are three gay women one of whom is trans, the narrative of transcending the limiting rules forced onto their physical bodies holds incredible power and potency.
There is much, much more to explore with the game’s themes, and I’m having to actively hold myself back from getting off track here. But this ^^^ gives you a general overview of its narrative around body, identity, truth and queer womanhood - which interact with some Gnostic mythos in fun and interesting ways.
Let’s take a little detour into the basics of that.
Gnosticism: Then and Now
Gnosticism appears riddled with controversy and contradictions, and I am far from being an expert on it; but mainly, it rests on the following beliefs:
Each one of us holds a spark of divinity in us, imparted to us by a higher being: Sophia, the Divine Feminine Wisdom;
Sophia is an aspect of The One, the Monad, the Supreme Godhead which is the unknowable source of all existence without any border;
The material world is (somewhat alchemically) created from the plane of Wisdom as a shadow of it, and is characterized by ignorance of the true divine origin of everything;
The material world is ruled by Yaldabaoth, Sophia’s rejected child and a distorted expression of her divine power;
Yaldabaoth created humanity in the image of one of the aspects of the Monad; our creation was an attempt at harnessing and capturing the divine spirit and mocking it by enslaving the human race;
Yaldabaoth is the personification of Ignorance, set on keeping us from knowing our true origin;
The true life and spirit we are imbued with come from Sophia, and by achieving gnosis - direct participation with the divine through knowledge - we help our divine sparks reunite with her, help Sophia retrieve her power and return to her full divine perfection. Through that, we leave the mortal body behind, breaking free from the prison of material existence.
As you can see, this sort of philosophy radically re-imagines some of the core beliefs of Christianity, while also doubling down on some of its aspects generally considered toxic and traumatizing: the vilification of the body, for one. It is also a bit of a nightmare for people prone to existential crises when interpreted very literally.
But the fact that Gnosticism prioritizes self-knowledge over compliance and seems to center the Divine Feminine have made it a sort of a healing haven for some of the people brought up in Christianity and traumatized by it. So far, I’ve heard about quite a few LGBTQ+ folks who turned to Gnosticism as a way to celebrate their self-exploration and liberation from externally enforced dogma.
Gnosticism was always rejected by mainstream Christianity as a direct and inconsolable challenge to it, and so ex-Christians turning to it as a way to find closure to the trauma of their upbringing makes perfect sense. At the same time, Gnosticism is considered to have formed during the process of separation of Christianity from Judaism, and Gnostics were still positioning themselves as a Christian sect. As the result, the core Gnostic texts contain many strong and unforgiving references to specifically “the Jewish God”, which has led to Gnosticism being labeled as “the Greatest case of metaphysical anti-Semitism” by Greshom Scholem, an Israeli scholar.
Considering how some alt-right groups and individuals get involved with “esoteric” belief systems and use them to enable their violent bigotry, all of this is… quite uncomfortable. I am yet to hear anyone address this discomfort when publically exploring the Gnostic myth of the Demiurge. That is the main reason I am bringing all of this up: to openly acknowledge the things that seem to often linger in the realm of the implied but too convoluted to get into. Let’s keep the dangerous implications in mind as we continue.
A lot of the people recovering from Christian trauma through participation in Gnostic philosophy seem to practice a form of… Reform Gnosticism, almost. Some seek to remedy the “body-soul” divide and the demonization of the physical. They may reclaim Gnosticism as a path of nondualism (“I am one with God”), when historically some expressions of it were rather radically dualist (the material existence as fully separate from God).
The host of the podcast “Discourse of the Stranger” uses Gnosticism as a way to challenge cisheteronormativity, patriarchy, White supremacy, ableism and other forms of the oppressive status quo. They find empowerment in independent self-knowledge that challenges the rhetoric maintained by power-hungry “rulers”.
Generally, among the “Reform” Gnostics a lot of focus seems to be on the re-centering and “redemption” of the Feminine. This is interesting, because the gender politics of Gnosticism seem far from clean-cut and straight-forward, at least to me; we will get into those in just a moment.
With the loaded aspects of Gnosticism acknowledged, I would like to reiterate the key points of what makes it appealing to recovering Christians and to LGBTQ+ people specifically: emphasis on independent self-knowledge, rejection of religious dogma, challenge to a very clear gender hierarchy established in the Book of Genesis. These, alongside with the concept of divine human spirit that is greater than the body, are going to be relevant as we discuss the narrative of We Know The Devil in the context of Gnostic mythos.
Gnostic Gender Politics
A good thing to keep in mind about Gnosticism is that it is, at the core, essentialist, operating from the idea that there are inherent Feminine and Masculine energies defining the workings of divine planes. In Gnosticism, “true” creation can only occur from the union of the two - which puts the Godhead in an interesting position. In the core Gnostic texts the Monad seems to alternate between:
being referred to by “it” pronoun and described as something unknowable and not in any way personified,
being pictured as a sort of bigender personification of the “Mother-Father” union,
and being referred to as masculine, down to the use of “Father” as a conventional term for the original creator.
The latter interpretation puts a bit of a problematic micro-spin on Sophia’s story, too. According to the Gnostic creation myth, the reason Yaldabaoth was not a true expression of Sophia’s divinity but a distorted one is that she did not operate in union with her “male counterpart” and didn’t “ask for her Father’s consent” before creating life the same way the Monad did. God forbid women do anything.
All of this creates an interesting duality in the role Sophia takes, depending on whether she’s interacting with the human race or being considered as a part of the broader pantheon.
From the perspective of human creation and history, Sophia is the closest thing we have to a genuine divine guide and patron. She is involved with the first humans: she indirectly imbues Adam with life and later visits him, awakening him from the slumber of ignorance. She is embodied in Eve, becoming the original expression of Femininity and womanhood on the material plane. In the world ruled by the Demiruge, where humans are trapped in forced oblivion, Sophia, Wisdom, is the voice of divinity speaking to us and helping us retrieve the knowledge of our origin. The Divine Feminine personified in her is a symbol of truth, belonging and liberation, counteracting the rules, limitations and rejection of dogmatic teachings.
In the greater cosmology, however, Sophia is a bit of a “fallen angel”. Her proximity with humanity and involvement with their spiritual journey are all the result of her “misconduct” and loss of divine perfection.
We carry the sparks of Sophia’s spirit in us, and her divinity is trapped in our bodies, down on Earth. By beckoning us back to self-knowledge, she restores herself to her full power, so that she may reside beside the rest of Aeons in the divine realm of Pleroma once again. Of course, in that we ourselves rejoin Pleroma as well - the most essential spiritual parts of us. We, or, at least, our consciousness, are her, so the jounery back to our origin is supposed to be a truly blissful one. The whole thing is an almost warm metaphor for spiritual awakening: it’s not about parting from something, it’s about coming home to what is basically our divine mother.
But the whole story of Sophia falling from her perfection and facing the pain and embarrassment of getting her spirit trapped in mortal bodies, all because she didn’t ask for her Father’s permission and created without the involvement of her Masculine partner - all of that sort of takes away from her girlboss status a bit. In a way, she is almost Eve 2, trapping all of humanity in an imperfect world because she didn’t listen to the Big God Dad well enough.
So, as you can see, the gender politics here are very contradictory and muddled. One might argue that the myth is very clearly symbolic, showing the alchemy-like relationship between thought and wisdom, wisdom and ignorance, etc., - but the essentialist gendered coding does still count for something.
But hey, the good news is that the original woman was a physical manifestation of the most godlike part of the original man!
Eve was born as an attempt by Yaldabaoth to extract the divine spirit Adam had been imbued with out of his body - and, cut out of his side, Eve-Sophia stepped into the material world as the strongest and purest expression of divine wisdom yet. Soon enough, Sophia had to separate herself from Eve, leaving the first woman just as mortal and ignorant as Adam - but the fact still stands that womanhood is pretty much synonymous with divinity in the Gnostic creation myth. And since Gnostics saw the temptation by the Serpent as a divine act of coercing humans out of ignorance (because, duh, fruit of knowledge), Eve is also considered a liberator to humanity, not the one to have doomed us. So, even with all the contradiction present, Gnostics are certainly winning the feminism game when compared to mainstream Christians.
Sophia’s role in the “temptation” is a very exciting one, too. To lead Eve and Adam to gnosis, Sophia lets her spirit possess the Serpent and has it urge Eve to eat of the forbidden fruit. Ultimately, Sophia takes the place of Lucifer - which works quite well with the “fall from divinity on the grounds of pridefulness” parallel, too, so something definitely juicy is happening here. But, most importantly, what was traditionally thought of as the Devil’s temptation is presented as a call from the Divine Feminine to reunite with the truth of oneself.
This idea echoes strongly in We Know The Devil, to the point where one has to wonder if it was intentional.
All Hail Our Devil Mom
In the True Ending of the visual novel, Group West refuse to alienate and reject either one of them as the most “sinful” - and through that break the rules of the game in which someone has to be “worse” for yourself to remain redeemable. Without God there to condemn one of them to full and crushing rejection, the Devil steps in.
The Devil talks to them on the radio in a sweet, loving voice, telling them they are missed. Telling them they have a home to come back to. Telling them there is space for three there, and that means: all of them, all of each and every one of them, without the need to hold anything back, to deny themselves even a shred of their truth.
As they try to make their choice - Jupiter horrified, Neptune loudly defiant and reckless and Venus quietly enthralled by the promise of authenticity, - the first two keep referring to the Devil with the “he” pronoun. Venus, however, says something that goes unnoticed and unacknowledged by the rest:
“She sounds nice”.
Our trans character senses something the cis ones do not pick up on, identifies something in the Devil’s voice that makes her recognize this entity as someone similar to herself.
That was the first thing to tip me off and make me go “Oh shit, is the whole story Gnostic?”. The way the Devil is pictured seems to resonate with the image of Sophia as the tempter and the liberator, the Divine Feminine energy imbuing all bodies, including AMAB ones. Running with this narrative, the game seems to play with the idea of Sophia getting recast by mainstream Christianity as a masculine entity, “Lucifer”, and basically getting culturally misgendered. Because women are insidious and corrupt enough to be the weak link and the Devil’s tools, but not important and powerful enough to be the Devil themself, I guess? Anyway.
When connected to the Gnostic mythos, a lot of the game’s themes and motifs gain additional rich context. The Devil missing her human children and calling for them to come back to her, like Sophia must be missing all the divine sparks, reinforces the idea that the characters are truly of the Devil, and the most “sinful” parts of them are actually evidence of their cosmic belonging. The fact that the Devil is someone who talks to the girls while also being something in them, the fact that each one of them may become the Devil at any given night, draws a very direct parallel to Sophia’s spirit present in all humans and tells us that the characters’ “sin” is the truest part of themselves, subject to repression lest it liberate them from the constraints of Christianity.
“Camp, country, Earth” are all pictured as a suffocating, cruel trap, very much in line with Gnostic existentialism - but that is meant to represent the constraints of hateful and self-hating human culture and Christian trauma. The cosmic, planetary motif of the girls’ names and essences connects Group West to something beyond it, imbuing them with spirit and truth that is at home somewhere else, somewhere natural and free.
Finally, there is their relationship with the body - and there is a lot to unpack there.
Body Transcendent
As a queer and very pointedly trans story, We Know The Devil handles the theme of the body with a lot of complexity. The Gnostic rejection of the physical is certainly not echoed one for one.
Much like when Sophia-Eve escaped Adam’s body as a raw and transcendental expression of the Divine Feminine, Venus escapes her own flesh to take on a form that is obviously feminine while also being completely trans-human: a biblically accurate angel, all wings and eyes and blinding light.
In the ultimate climactic resolution of We Know The Devil, Jupiter, Venus and Neptune are (re)united as a sort of an Unholy Trinity polycule.
They do not necessarily leave the material world as Gnostics intended - but they reform it, freeing everyone else of the shackles of their limited, tortured bodies as well. The Devil a.k.a. Sophia, Godhood, Divinity, is not found in a different realm - but in each other, in the direct and powerful embodiment of a queer relationship, in openness and truth and power of standing beside each other.
And, once again, the rejection of the body is not reinforced. The bodily symbolism permeates the girls’ characterization, in their assigned body parts and (perhaps) in the related Enneagram types - so the body was never something alien and wrong. The goal is not to leave the material behind but to ascend to a truer, more divine version of it; the true body is a shared, transcendent one. The purpose of awakening to one’s spiritual truth is to embody a part of the whole instead of remaining separate, trapped and isolated, a dead mockery of one’s essence.
That’s what the subtle Gnostic coding seems to convey. In the bodily union of queer women existing freely and unapologetically, the characters return to their essence and get to exist as something powerful: a truly divine version of themselves.
TL;DR: Thank you, women.
I said I was going to have fun with this one, and lo and behold! Had a real blast. God I literally adore WKTD so much.
Thank you for sticking around till the end of the post! If you enjoyed it, please consider letting me know? I would absolutely love to hear your thoughts :)
For the next post (coming roughly in two weeks), I’ll probably blab about Centaurworld and its narrative of child-like maturity; very yummy. Make sure to join if you like stories about trauma recovery!
Have a lovely day and weekend, friends, and take care!