Robin thoughts on this are very close to my own. My cosmology is heavily gonstic in this sense.
Here are some ideas I've been exploring - I have settled on any as the Truth yet.
"the Demiurge is an emanation of a higher divinity which is so far removed from reality that it doesn't have any influence on it."
Or just doesn't care. This would be the true Divinty.
"Among those emanations (think of it as a distilling process) there was another divinity which was able to fragment itself and have each fragment be a conscious but imperfect whole - many from one."
Division for unity.
The DU is in my game is a further fragmentation (child if you will) of one of these Emanations. As an imperfect being, he had an imperfect character and created an imperfect Prison (for me hell, heaven, the illusion are all DU creations and are all Prisons for the fragmented souls of humanity - cut into pieces as people, angels and nepharites - they torture and stunt themselves).
Humanity are the emanations of a different higher-order emanation (3rd generation gods in a sense). This higher emanation is Metropolis and they - its fragments - lived in it until DU came along. DU was different but similiar to them. He fragmented himself, creating Ashtaroth, when he began manipulating Gaia (another Emanation) and Metropolis to create the illusion. The DU was powerful enough to create these prisons, and fragment and subdue humanity with Ashtaroth's because he had killed his parent emanation.
The Archon/Death Angels are the same things, they reflect each other. Same with DU/ASh. Humans do too, but in a tripartite way - humans, angels, nepharites.
The Archons/Death Angels are actually the DU and Ashtaroth, further fragmented. DU and Ash used to control things ok, but as humanity slowly awakened through history, and began to draw the Metropolis into the Illusion (ie by building citites), DU/Ash realised another tact was necessary, so they fragmented into Archons. They were weaker that way, but more pervasive. It is also why there is no DU/Ash in my game.
Or the Archons/DAs are other enslaved fragments from yet another emanation. But enslaving them weakened DU/Ash, and now the DU has gone (perhaps run off? enslaved himself by some greater force?).
But there is only one archon left in my game, so perhaps the others have escaped. Only the Archons and humanities servants are left behind, as is the DU/Ash degenerating legacy.
In any case, the DU is gone, and perhaps Ash too.
Gaia being another emanation has its own fragmented creates. Unlike Metropolis's children, not all of these are imprisoned in the Illusion, though some are. Humans call them faeries. Met. and Gaia were raw materials for the DU's illusion building, but now the illusion is breaking down, the emanations are seeping through and so humanity will be back in the Metropolis (though still imprisoned in flesh and in a lot of trouble!). They will also have the encroaching Gaia to contained with, which has a foothold in the City (in my campaign, it killed one of the Archons, whose rotting body is currently the roots of the Tree-shaped gateway atop one of the Archon buildings).
Once the Prisons are gone, humans still have to unite with their thirds and have to deal with the clashing emanations.
I'm not sure this could be placed out. Once the PCs have ascended in the Met. they'll find the struggling post-apocolpyse unawakened humans are holding them back. They'll have to help them. Once this is done, they might rejoin the Met/Gaia (depending on whether they are humans or faeries - and 2 of the PCs are faeries), or they might work to destroy them like the DU did his, thus giving them great powers.
"Actually both Demiurge and Astaroth prefer souls falling into the abyss and thus out of reality. These fragments cannot return and each lost fragment weakens the prospective deity."
The DU's abyss or Achlys?
I can see how both would be considered good, hough I wouldn't say the abyss leads out of reality, only the "realities" the DU created.
My PCs are currently dealing with the nuclear war (between Indian/Pakistan/China and between Israel/Jordon/Palestine/Saudi Arabia) that heralds the final weakening of the illusion and the apocolypse. They are beginning to sense the unreality of time/space and Achlys that lies beyond it. Currently they yearn for their old lives (a clever trap of the Prison is this!), for escape (but into what?) and for annihilation. They are gaining more servants, more control over the met. and some have unified with their angelic or demonic pieces.
