Gnostic Beliefs

Gnostic beliefs start from an uncomfortable premise: the world has a maker, and he is not the highest God. What follows is a whole cosmology. These articles set it out in order rather than treating it as a curiosity. The sources are real manuscripts, and most of them lay in a jar in Upper Egypt until 1945.

First, the creator. The demiurge believes himself alone, and the archons are the powers who keep his world running. How a flaw entered a perfect order is the subject of the myth of Sophia. 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. The Gospel of Truth is closer to a poem than a treatise. The Gospel of Judas turns the betrayal inside out. 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, open The Gnostic Gospels: Master Collection. It gathers them all, each with an introduction.