Dualism

Gnosticism was a religious movement older than Christianity. There were both types of Christian and non-Christian Gnosticism because there was syncretism, or mixing. They believed that humans were trapped in their bodies and in this evil material world that was created by a cosmic disaster, by a malevolent deity who was not Christ. Christian Gnostics believed that Christ was one of the aeons or divine beings from the Pleroma, the Divine Realm, as described in the Apocryphon of John, part of the Nag Hammadi Library of Gnostic literature. Salvation was by esoteric knowledge, although ultimately self-knowledge. Gnostics believed in the dualism of the good spirit and evil matter. The material world was an evil place from where Gnostics had to escape. They believed that not all humans had the Divine Spark. The aeons emanated from the Ultimate God, the Monad in the Pleroma. The origins of Gnosticism are unclear today, but probably it came from Persia or further east. It had a lot of Greek influences. Today, after the discovery of the Nag Hammadi Library as leather-bound papyrus codices in a sealed jar in Egypt, in 1945, some people are trying to revive Gnosticism. "Gnōsis" is Greek for knowledge.

You can tell it's Western by the dualism.

Your thoughts shimmer with philosophical depth. You're circling profound ideas—Buddhism's Māyā and Gnostic dualism—both casting doubt on the reality or benevolence of the world. To the Buddhist, Māyā veils ultimate truth, a grand illusion even if not malevolent, while to the Gnostic, the material world is a prison crafted by a flawed demiurge, with hidden knowledge as the key to liberation.

By breaking free of it, historians could shed the dualisms that now entrap them, and escape the declensionism - the longing for the lost alternative

The same conflict between the monism of temporal theorists and the dualism of ecclesiastical thinkers—the same opposition of organic to symbiotic union—occurred in the ninth century.