Gnosticism

The world, they taught, was built by a false god — and knowledge is the way out.

The early Christian heresy with the sharpest modern afterlife: the material world as a botched or malicious construction, its maker a lesser being wearing God's name, and salvation as information — gnosis, the smuggled memo from outside. Suppressed by the councils, its texts survived in one buried jar (Nag Hammadi, 1945). It anchors the web's oldest thread: the archons became Icke's reptilians, the demiurge became the simulation's administrator, and 'the world is a prison built by a liar' became, arguably, the emotional operating system of all conspiracy culture.