most everyone in this thread so far is a returning dingodad loyalist, but after that last reply any newcomers lurking will have now got a taste of just how longwinded I can be sometimes... haha... SO, RE:miniQuiny: I wrote a LOT last night and I'm going to use this fresh start as an opportunity to see if I can force myself to be a liiiittle more succinct. firstly, thanks malo for stepping in to answer the stickiest part of the post.

but to answer your question: my journey into Gnosticism started with simple Wikipedia surfing! And while many may disagree with me on this passionately, that's exactly where I'd recommend any newcomers to the topic - as far as it relates to Homestuck - should start as well. Because the aim is not necessarily to know everything about Gnosticism, or even to necessarily 'understand' it; the Homestuck reader's aim should be to recognise Gnosticism as an umbrella under which a WIDE variety of Christian philosophies have historically fallen under, so they can identify what about Homestuck places it under that same umbrella. One new to this area of analysis can easily become intimidated thinking that they need to know everything about all the myriad and varied mythologies that have been called Gnostic in the past to understand how Gnosticism applies to Homestuck, but all you're looking to find on that first Wiki walk is enough to figure out what Homestuck has in common with those mythologies. See Malo's great summary above for a good rundown of just what those commonalities are.

To use some more recognisable strains of Christianity as an example: in practice, there are hundreds upon thousands of minute differences in the ways Orthodox and Catholic Christians experience their religions. But you don't actually need to know every single one of these, or even most of them, to be able to identify what makes something "Orthodox" or "Catholic". You really just need to understand that at some point at the turn of the second millennium there was a big split in approach, and that Orthodoxy exists on one side of that split and Catholicism on the other. Figure out which side of the split your webcomic belongs to, and then you can spend the rest of your time learning about the thing you actually came here to learn about, which is your webcomic.

(DO NOT TAKE THIS AS ACTUAL THEOLOGICAL ADVICE OR ANALYSIS. I AM SIMPLIFYING FOR THE SAKE OF A HOMESTUCK POST. I'M SORRY GOD)

Caliborn's denizen is a case in point. "Yaldabaoth" was a name used by certain sects of Gnostics at a certain point in time to understand the demiurge by, and these sects had a whole bunch of complex mythology surrounding Yaldabaoth and his place in the cosmos. But knowing or understanding that mythos isn't required to actually get why Yaldabaoth is in Homestuck. For the most part, he acts as a big signpost saying GNOSTIC THEMES HERE: because, as you correctly identified, Homestuck's main demiurge figure is Lord English, who gains his powers from completing Yaldabaoth's quest.

A great example of someone NOT following this advice and getting too bogged down in the specifics of the mythology is me, in my own first post in the list! In some versions of the Gnostic myth, the demiurge had a kind of female counterpart who was trapped within the false world he created, and it was Christ or some equivalent spiritual figure's job to save her. This version of the story was so compelling to me that it totally coloured my understanding of Calliope's role in the story, and as a result my first "Homestuck's Gnosticism" essay - which was intended to treat Gnosticism in such basic and simplistic terms that anyone, especially a new convert such as yourself could follow along and begin to understand - was totally bogged down by my fixation with this male-aspect-versus-female-aspect narrative, to the point that it muddied the real key points I was trying to make. You can really tell, I think, that my last paragraph is a clumsy attempt to reconcile two interpretations of the text that are sort of related but don't quite actually fit in with one another.

This is a big part of why I eventually moved away from Gnosticism as my main angle and instead used it as a springboard toward loftier and meatier ideas - another being that Beyond Canon started to deconstruct Homestuck in a new way that opened my eyes to a lot of stuff I had been ignorant of. For instance that Calliope - the demiurge's "female counterpart" - isn't necessarily just some innocent victim of English's whose soul needs to be saved for the good of all people, but another face of the demiurge in her own right, exactly as Malo explains in his post. But I include the post in the list partly because I still think the essay can work as a springboard for other readers trying to embark on the same journey, and partly because the second part - about black holes and time loops - remains a bit of writing I'm still really proud of, not least of all because it basically became kind of pretty much canon in HS2?

As a total aside, I will say that reading about Gnosticism for the purpose of understanding Homestuck did eventually inspire a real fascination for the topic within me, and I graduated from Wikipedia to niche homebrew sites looking for English translations of ancient Gnostic texts. If anyone gets the time, I would really recommend even just glancing over the fourth and fifth books of the Pistis Sophia, which can be easily found online via google. There's a point at which Jesus starts instructing Mary on, like, an intricate series of dungeons located in the darkness outside of the universe, each one ruled over by a demonic tyrant with the head of a different animal? It's some crazy shit. Very much like if there was a total cultural victory of anime & manga but it happened back in the 3rd and 4th centuries A.D.