Gnostic beliefs start from an uncomfortable premise: the world was made, but not by the highest God. What follows from that premise is a whole cosmology, and these articles set it out in order rather than treating it as a curiosity. The sources are real manuscripts, most of them buried in a jar in Upper Egypt and read again only after 1945.

The creator comes first. The demiurge believes himself alone, and the archons are the powers who keep his world running. The myth of Sophia explains how a flaw entered a perfect order, and the Valentinian ogdoad maps the realms above it. Salvation in these systems is knowledge rather than forgiveness, which is why the movement took its name from gnosis.

The texts themselves repay reading. The Secret Book of John is the fullest statement of the cosmology, Pistis Sophia gives the divine feminine a voice, and the Gospel of Truth is closer to a poem than a treatise. The Gospel of Judas turns the betrayal inside out, and a summary of the thirteen codices tells you what is actually in the library.

If you would rather have the primary texts in front of you, they are gathered and introduced in The Gnostic Gospels: Master Collection.