What are the Goa'uld In Stargate?

Stargate SG-1 and Atlantis, like the various Star Treks and other Sci-Fi shows seem like the gnostic gospels of some American writers. (One of the really interesting things to me about Stargate and a show like Supernatural is an apparent antipathy to the CIA but that's probably worth a whole separate post.)

The nemesis of SG-1 is a parasitic wormlike race of beings called the Goa'uld that inhabit a human body and integrate with and completely take over the host's consciousness. The goa'uld have technology but are not creative; they're pure authoritarians, destroyers and stealers. They're identical to the Borg on Star Trek and The Empire in Star Wars or the Matrix and maybe the Cylons of Battlestar Galactica.

At some point in the Stargate series the main character Daniel Jackson "ascends" and becomes a being who can assume solid form and teleport around at will. (Off the top of my head, I forget what these people are called.) Helena Blavatsky wrote about "ascended masters", which is probably the same concept that's being portrayed in Stargate.

What is all this stuff really about?

The fictional conceptualization of egregore or goa'uld is a way to speculate about the nature of the universe, and really speculate about its inhospitibility to boundless human desires.

The goa'uld et al are third things or egregore and in the scheme of stargate and the other fictional works listed above there's a duality of egregore. The egregore are creatures with independent existence but no manifestation except through man. (cf The Upside Down in Stranger Things or platonic forms.) In this scheme certain aspects and elements of man and the natural world create the basis for the dark and destructive egregore that speaks and acts through human beings who are its agents in the real world. The ascended masters are like the light egregore who have a "hands off" policy with respect to the human world. (In Dungeons and Dragons terms Nature is Neutral Good and the light egregore are really the embodiment of the benevolent aspect of nature)

The transformation of these forces into fictional characters is a way for an author to cross over from the human reality world into their world. Science and engineering are ways for the world of forms and concepts to have manifestation in our world. Indeed modernity was in a very real sense kicked off with a message from their side to John Dee which initiated a willful attempt at engineering the world. (This is actually parodied in a Stargate Atlantis epsiode)