The fowls of the heavens, and of the beasts whatever is beneath the earth, or upon the earth, and the fishes of the sea, these are they that draw you unto the Divine. Oxyrhynchus Papyri (Gnostic fragments in Greek)

The purpose of my extrapolations is to bring the material to the place where it engages human potential, the place from which it can be lived, here and now. Call this, if you will, dynamic mythology.  

In addition to the extrapolations, I also venture to make corrections in the materia mythica, or in the way it is interpreted. This is necessary because some myths have become corrupted over time, and because of the intentional hijacking (co-optation, to use the polite word) of mythic themes and figures to serve ends contrary to their authentic meaning. An example of hijacking is the identification of the winter solstice, a recurring moment traditionally associated with the birth of Pagan solar gods such as Mithras, with the literal birthday of Jesus, the Christian savior. Another instance associated with Christmas is Santa Claus, who dresses in red and white and comes down the chimney, as everyone knows. These folk-loric details are partially corrupted and partially co-opted from shamanic lore in which the shaman who eats the amanita muscaria (fly-agaric mushroom) travels in the sky by magic flight, climbs a ladder to the stars, etc. Santa's sled is pulled by reindeer because these animals are known to eat the same psychoactive mushrooms. The red, white-spotted mushrooms still used in Christmas decor around the world are unmistakable replicas of amanitas.  
To correct the popular mythology of Christmas is to restore it to its original values, and reinstate the true references of the motifs and images. Correction and restoration go together. In Gnostic myth, the goddess Sophia plunges from the Pleroma (cosmic center) and morphs into the earth. She becomes the very planet we inhabit. This event is clearly described in the paraphrases of the Church father Irenaeus, but it is largely absent in any surviving Coptic materials. No original account survives of Sophia's conversion (in Greek, epistrophe) into the earth. And what's worse, the received interpretation of the Gnostic myth of the fallen goddess, accepted and repeated by almost all scholars, wrongly states that the Demiurge or lord Archon creates the material world. This is the source of the Manichean doctrine of world-denial, a version of split-source duality. In this site and in my published writings, especially Not in His Image, I attempt to correct this interpretation and restore the genuine, coherent, and self-consistent form of the Sophia myth.   John Lamb Lash   metahistory.org