The Demiurge is great and powerful. It is the god of this universe, identified in the Old Testament as Yahweh. But there is a higher God that came before the Demiurge, known as "the Father" in Gnostic cosmology. The Demiurge was the by-product of the Fall, when the Aeon known as Logos mistook itself for the Son of the Father and attempted to plug itself back into the Father. These Aeons of the Fullness are known as the First Order of Powers, created from the Son as his individualized traits and capabilities. When the Aeon called Logos Fell from the Pleroma of the Father and the Son, it left the ethereal realm and created the material universe in which we dwell.
We Second Order Powers do battle with the imitations of the Deficiency and each other, barely remembering the Father Above and the Fullness of the Son.
Because the movement that brought about the Fall was not prompted by the Father, it lacks the lifeblood of the Father known as the Holy Spirit, and it lacks the power and names of the Aeons of the Fullness it left behind. What remains is the broken body of a dead Logos, consisting of the small, dark, and superficial imitations of the Aeons known as the Deficiency. Having forgotten the Father above and its brothers and sisters in the Pleroma, the Demiurge believes it is the first and only god and that none exists before it. Because of this amnesia, the weak and scattered bits of the Demiurge are no more than surface-level reflections of the Aeons above, lacking the power and abilities of the Fullness. The Demiurge controls these imitations with an iron fist, as they lack the capabilities needed to create and sustain the material universe without the guidance of the Fullness. The Demiurge gives the imitation the form Logos arrived with when it Fell, out of its own blueprint, and this is the design of our material universe. But the Demiurge is unable to confer life upon the imitations, as it lacks the Holy Spirit's capability of infusing life into the mud.
We living creatures are called the Second Order of Powers, because we are the direct descendants of the First Order of Powers. We Second Order Powers do possess a memory of the Father and the Fullness; we remember the Paradise from which we came. The Gnostic gospel claims that we living beings are the fruit of the First Order of Powers sent here by the Aeons and the Son to do battle against the imitations of the deficiency, with the ultimate goal of winning over the fallen bits of Logos by bringing remembrance and virtue to the Demiurge. It is only by remembering the Father and Fullnesses that the Fallen Aeon may be restored to the Pleroma above.
But the battle with the imitation is difficult. We find ourselves in a never-ending war with ignorance and death.