The Gnosis According to Its Friends

The Gnosis According to Its Friends

Sempiterna Lux! Nec divitias nec honores peto; me modo Divinæ Lucis radio illumines!

                 From An Essay of Transmigration in Defence of Pythagoras (London, 1692).

Some Greek Original Works in Coptic Translation

THE ASKEW AND BRUCE CODICES.

So far we have endeavoured to recover some fragments of flotsam and jetsam from the pitiful wreck of the Gnosis, wrought by the hands of its bitterest foes, the orthodox Church Fathers; we will now try to give the reader some rough idea of the contents of some Gnostic treatises, which have been preserved to us in Coptic translation by the hands of its friends.

We have to consider the contents of three precious documents known as the Askew, Bruce, and Akhmīm Codices, the last of which was only discovered in 1896. We shall reserve the Akhmīm Codex for later notice, since little is so far known of it, and so give our immediate attention to the Askew and Bruce Codices.

The Askew Codex was bought by the British Museum from the heirs of Dr. Askew at the The Askew Codex. end of the last century (presumably a little prior to 1785). The MS. is written on vellum in Greek uncials, in the Upper Egyptian

dialect, and is not in roll but in book-form. It consists of 346 quarto pages, and for the most part is in an excellent state of preservation; a few leaves only are missing. The Codex is a copy and not an original; and the original was a translation from the Greek. The general contents consist of a treatise to which custom has given the name Pistis Sophia, owing to a heading in the middle of the general narrative, added by another hand. The treatise has no superscription or subscription, and though there is a long incident in it dealing with the passion and redemption of the Sophia, other parts of equal length might just as well be called The Questions of Mary, as Harnack has suggested, and Matter long prior to him. The Codex also contains a short inset and a lengthy appendix entitled Extracts from the Books of the Saviour. For a further description I must refer the reader to the Introduction of my translation.

The Bruce CodexThe Bruce Codex was brought to England from Upper Egypt in 1769 by the famous Scottish traveller Bruce, and bequeathed to the care of the Bodleian Library, Oxford. It is written on papyrus, in Greek cursive characters, in the Upper Egyptian dialect, and consists of seventy-eight leaves, in book-form. Its leaves are in a most terrible state of disorder and dilapidation, and many are missing. A scientific examination of the Codex reveals the fact that it consists of two distinct MSS., containing the remains of at least two distinct Gnostic works and some fragments. The superior MS., of better material and finer handwriting, contains a treatise of great sublimity, but without a title, the

first and last pages being lost. The other MS. contains fragments of at least two separate books, and preserves the title The Book of the Great Logos according to the Mystery. This is taken by Schmidt to be the general title, and to comprise two parts which he calls respectively the First and Second Book, of Ieou.

The contents of these treatises are of such a marvellous and complex nature, that I despair of Translations. giving the general reader any adequate conception of them. The student may, however, form some idea of the task by reading my translation of the Pistis Sophia treatise and the Extracts from the Books of the Saviour; but even this will give him no adequate conception of the complexity of the contents of the Codex Brucianus, of which, unfortunately, there is as yet no English translation.

In 1891 Amélineau published a text and French translation of the Bruce Codex with a brief introduction; but his text was based on Woide’s copy of the Codex made a century ago, and the French savant had no idea that he was dealing with two distinct MSS., whose leaves were jumbled up in inextricable confusion.

In 1892 Dr. Carl Schmidt, having with admirable patience collated the copies of the Codex made by Schwartze and Woide with the original at Oxford, and with still greater acumen and industry separated the two MSS. and placed their respective leaves in order, published a critical text, with a German translation and a voluminous commentary.

In the following résumé, with regard to the Codex

[paragraph continues] The Difficulty of the Subject.Brucianus, I shall follow Schmidt’s translation and not Amélineau’s. Schmidt is by far the most competent authority in the field, and no praise is too high a tribute to pay this most distinguished Coptic scholar for his unwearied patience. I have before me a rough translation of the whole of Schmidt’s voluminous work, and have spared no pains to make myself acquainted with his labours; but, even with his help, I feel as yet a very tyro in the Gnosticism revealed in these treatises. For, though Schmidt throws light on many points, innumerable problems are still left untouched; in fact, with all his admirable scholarship and infinite research, he is entirely baffled on just those very points which seem to have been of greatest interest to the composers or compilers of these Gnostic documents.

When, in 1896, I published a translation of the Pistis Sophia I had intended to follow it up with a commentary; but I speedily found that in spite of the years of work I had already given to Gnosticism, there were still many years of labour before me, ere I could satisfy myself that I was competent to essay the task in any really satisfactory fashion; I have accordingly reserved that task for the future. Meantime, in the present short sketches nothing more is attempted than a very tentative summary, so that the general reader may obtain some notion of the contents of our Coptic Gnostic treatises; my only excuse for breaking silence being that there is absolutely nothing as yet in English on the contents of the Bruce Codex.

We will, then, first of all attempt a summary of the contents of the so-called Pistis Sophia Programme. treatise; then a summary of the Extracts from the Books of the Saviour, inserted in and following after this treatise in the Askew Codex. This will be followed by a summary of the fragments contained in the inferior MS. of the Bruce Codex. I shall venture, however, to transpose Schmidt’s main order, and place what he calls The Second Book of Ieou before what he calls The First, for the general subjects of his first group of fragments seem to me to follow the subjects of his second, rather than the contrary. It is quite true that the beginning of his second division starts on the verso of the papyrus leaf, the recto of which contains the end of the other; but this only assures us the correct position of two adjacent fragments. That the numerous other fragments are always arranged in their proper sequence is by no means quite certain, though I frankly confess I so far see no more satisfactory ordering of the chaos myself.

That we have among these fragments part of the original contents of The Books of Ieou mentioned in the Pistis Sophia seems highly probable, but that we can assign our fragments definitely to Books I. and II. is not so certain. The whole will therefore in our summary stand under the general title, The Book of the Great Logos according to the Mystery, without further distinction, including both the introductory matter and also the leaves surrounded by a border, which Schmidt adds as an appendix. But it must be understood that this

is a tentative arrangement. There may be several treatises to which the fragments of the inferior MS. of the Bruce Codex ought to be assigned for anything we know to the contrary.

This will be followed by the fragments of the untitled treatise contained in the superior MS.

The purpose that has guided me in this general arrangement is, as far as possible, to place the contents of these Coptic translations roughly in such a sequence that the reader may be led from lower to higher grades of the Gnosis. I am perfectly aware that higher mysteries (the three Spaces of the Inheritance) are spoken of and explained in the Pistis Sophia treatise than in the rest of the matter, but they are not revealed. In The Book of the Great Logos and in the Extracts from the Books of the Saviour some of the mysteries are given, and the disciples are made to see face to face. I therefore place the summary of the Pistis first, though it was probably composed last.

SUMMARY OF THE CONTENTS OF THE SO-CALLED PISTIS SOPHIA TREATISE.

THE treatise begins by informing us that Jesus, after rising from the dead, had spent eleven years The Teaching of the Eleven years. with His disciples, instructing them. So far, however, He had taught them the mysteries of the inner world up to a certain point only, apparently up to the outermost realms of the Light-world only, and yet even so far with omissions of many points which they were as yet incapable of understanding. But so wonderful had been the instruction imparted that the disciples imagined that all had been revealed to them, and that the First Mystery—the Father in the likeness of a dove—was the end of all ends and the gnosis of all gnoses. They did not know that this First Mystery was the lowest of a vast series of still higher mysteries.

It came to pass, therefore, in the twelfth year, that the disciples were assembled with the Master on The Mystic Transfiguration and Ascent in the Twelfth year. the Mount of Olives, rejoicing that they had, as they thought, received all the fullness. It was the fifteenth day of the month Tybi, the day of the full moon. Jesus was sitting apart, when, at sunrise, they beheld a great light-stream pouring over Him, so that he became lost to view in the ineffable radiance which stretched from earth to heaven. The light was not one radiance, but its rays were of every kind and type; and in it the Master soared aloft into heaven, leaving the disciples in great fear

and confusion as they silently gazed after Him. From the third hour of the fifteenth day until the ninth hour of the morrow (thirty hours) the Master was absent; and during this time there was a shaking of all the regions and great confusion and fear, while songs of praise came forth from the interior of the interiors.

The Master returns to His Disciples.On the ninth hour of the morrow they saw Jesus descending in infinite light, more brilliant far than when He had ascended; the light was now of three degrees, glory transcending glory. The disciples were dismayed and in great fear, but Jesus, the compassionate and merciful-minded, spake unto them, saying: “Take courage, it is I; be not afraid.” At their prayer Jesus withdraws His great light into Himself, and appears in His familiar form once more, and the disciples come to worship, and ask Him, saying: “Master, whither didst thou go? or on what ministry wentest thou? or wherefore are all these confusions and shakings?”

The Master, now speaking as the glorified Christ, bids them rejoice, for that now He will tell them all things “from the beginning of the truth to the end thereof,” face to face, without parable, for that authority has now been given Him by the First Mystery to reveal these things unto them.

Of the Mystic Incarnation of the Twelve.For this cause is it that He hath again been clothed in the vesture of light, the robe of glory; which he had left with the First Mystery, in the lowest spaces of the supernal Light-realm. He hath received it in order that He may speak to human kind and reveal all the mysteries, but

first of all to the Twelve. For the Twelve are His order, whom He hath chosen from the beginning, before He came into the world. He chose twelve powers, receiving them from the hands of the twelve Saviours of the Light-treasure, and when He descended into the world cast them, as light-sparks, into the wombs of their mothers, that through them the whole world might be saved. It is by reason of these powers that they are not of the world, for the power in them is from Him, a part of Himself.

So too another of His powers was in John the Baptizer with water for the remission of sins; not That the Soul of Elias is born in the Baptist. only so, but the soul of John was the soul of Elias reborn in him. These things had He explained before, when He said: “If ye will receive it, John the Baptist is Elias, who, I said, was for to come”; but they had not understood.

Into Mary, His mother, also He had implanted a power higher than them all, “the body which I bore Of His own Incarnation. in the height,” and also another power instead of the soul, and so Jesus was born. It was He Himself who had watched over the birth of His disciples, so that no soul of the world-rulers should be found in them, but one of a higher nature.

And the Master continued in His conversation and said unto them: “Lo, I have put on My vesture, and Concerning the Robe of Glory. all power hath been given Me by the First Mystery. Yet a little while and I will tell you the mystery of the plērōma and the plērōma of the plērōma; I will conceal nothing from you from this hour, but in perfectness will I perfect you in the whole plērōma, and all perfection, and every mystery; which things,

indeed, are the perfection of all perfections, the plērōma of all plērōmas, and the gnosis of all gnoses, which are in My vesture. I will tell you all mysteries from the exterior of the exteriors, to the interior of the interiors. Hearken, I will tell you all things which have befallen Me.

“It came to pass, when the sun had risen in the regions of the east, that a great stream of light descended in which was My vesture, the same which I had laid up in the four-and-twentieth mystery, as I have said unto you. And I found a mystery in My vesture, written in these five words which pertain to the height: Zama, Zama, Ōzza, Rachama, Ōzai. And this is the interpretation thereof:

“The Mystery which is beyond the world, that whereby all things exist: It is all evolution and all involution; It projected all emanations and all things therein. Because of It all mysteries exist and all their regions.”

Hereupon the Master recites the hymn of praise and welcome sung by the powers at His investiture on the Great DayThe Hymn of Welcome “Come unto us.” “Come unto us”—the day of this supreme initiation, when all His Limbs are gathered together. “Come unto us, for we are Thy fellow-members (or limbs). We are all one with Thee. We are one and the same, and Thou art one and the same. This is the First Mystery, who hath existed from the beginning in the Ineffable, before He came forth; and the Name thereof is all of us. Now, therefore, we all live together for Thee at the last limit, which also is the last mystery from the interior. That also is part of us. Now, therefore, we have sent Thee Thy

vesture, which, indeed, is Thine from the beginning, which Thou didst leave in the last limit, which also is the last mystery from the interiors, until its time should be fulfilled, according to the commandment of the First Mystery. Lo, its time being fulfilled, I give it Thee.

“Come unto us, for we all stand near to clothe Thee with the First Mystery and all His glory, by commandment of the same, in that the First Mystery gave us two vestures to clothe Thee, besides the one we have sent Thee, since Thou art worthy of them, and art prior to us, and came into being before us. For this cause, therefore, the First Mystery hath sent for Thee through us the mystery of His glory, two vestures.”

The hymn proceeds to explain how that the first vesture hath in it the whole glory of all the names The Three Vestures of Light. of all the mysteries of all the orders of the spaces of the Ineffable; that the second contains the whole glory of all the names, or powers, of all the mysteries, or emanations, of the orders of the twin spaces of the First Mystery; that the third vesture contains all the glory of the powers of the emanations of all the spaces and sub-spaces below these supernal realms as far as the earth. The hymn then continues:

“Lo, therefore, we have sent Thee this [third] vesture, without any [of the powers] knowing it from the First Statute downward; because the glory of its light was hidden in it [the First Statute], and the spheres with all their regions from the First Statute downwards [knew it not]. Make haste, therefore;

clothe Thyself with this vesture. Come unto us; for ever, until the time appointed by the Ineffable was fulfilled, have we been in need of Thee, to clothe Thee with the two [remaining] ventures, by order of the First Mystery. Lo, then, the time is fulfilled. Come, therefore, to us quickly, in order that we may clothe Thee, until Thou hast accomplished the full ministry of the perfections of the First Mystery, the ministry appointed for Thee by the Ineffable. Come, therefore, to us quickly, in order that we may clothe Thee, according to the commandment of the First Mystery; for yet a little while, a very little while, and Thou shalt come to us, and shalt leave the world. Come, therefore, quickly, that Thou mayest receive the whole glory, the glory of the First Mystery.”

The Journey into the Height.Thereupon, on hearing the hymn of the powers, the Master said, He donned the lowest robe of glory, and, changed into pure light, soared upwards and came to the lower firmament. And all the powers of that firmament were in great confusion because of the transcendent light; and on seeing the mystery of their names or powers inscribed in it, leaving their ranks, they bowed down and worshipped, saying: “How hath the Lord of the plērōma changed us without our knowing!” And they all sang together to the interior of the interiors a hymn of praise in harmony.

And so He passed upwards and inwards to the First Sphere above the firmament, shining with a radiance forty-and-nine times as great as before, and the gates were opened and He entered the mansions

of the Sphere, and the powers were changed and worshipped, and sang hymns of rejoicing as before.

Thence upward and inward he passed to the Second Sphere, shining with a light nine-and-forty times still more intensified, and the powers of that sphere did as them beneath them, and bowed and worshipped and sang hymns to the interior of the interiors.

Still continuing His triumphal flight, He soared still higher within, to the Space of the Twelve Æons, shining with radiance forty-and-nine times still further increased. And all the orders and rulers of the Æonic Space were amazed. Those of them called the Tyrants, under their great leader Adamas, in ignorance fought against the light; but in vain, for they only expended their strength one against the other, and fell down and became “as the inhabitants of the earth who are dead and who have no breath in them”—that is to say, deprived of the light-spark, like the unknowing among men.

And He took from them a third of their power, that they should no more prevail in their evil doings; The Master Robs the Æons of a Third of their Light. so that if men should invoke them for evil in the magic practices which the transgressing Angels brought down from above, they should not be able to work their will as heretofore.

And so He changed the Fate-Sphere, over which they are lords. For by order of the First Statute and First Mystery, they had been set, by Ieou, the Overseer of the Light, all facing the Left, accomplishing their influences. But now they were changed so that for six months they faced the Left and for six months the Right.

The Questions of Mary.Hereupon, the Master having invited questions and interpretations of the mysteries He has revealed, Mary Magdalene, who is throughout represented as the most spiritual by far of all the disciples, comes forward, and being granted permission to speak, interprets a passage from Isaiah by the light of the new teaching. The passage begins with the words: “Where, then, O Egypt, where are thy diviners and ordainers of the hour?”—and among other things Egypt is said to mean the “inefficacious matter (hylē).”

Mary is commended for her intuition, and in reply to her further questioning, the Master explains that all their power has not been taken from these Rulers of the Fate, by the third robe of glory, but only a third of it; so that if the ordainers of the hour chance on the Fate or the Sphere turning to the Left, they will say what is to take place; but if they chance on it turning to the Right they will not be able to prophesy, for He has changed all the influences. But those who know the mysteries of the magic of the Thirteenth Æon will accomplish them perfectly, for He has not taken away the power in that Space, according to the command of the First Mystery.

Why the Rulers have been robbed.In reply to a question by Philip, it is explained that this conversion of the spheres has been effected to aid the salvation of souls; otherwise the number of perfected souls would have been kept back from its accomplishment, that is to say, of those who shall be counted in the heritage of the height, by means of the mysteries, and shall dwell in the Light-treasure. The power of the Rulers is in the matter

of the world which they make into souls By the victory of the Master a third of this power has been taken from them, and converted to a higher substance.

In answer to Mary’s further questioning, it is further explained how this third part of their power was taken away. It always had been that their power, as it became purified, was gathered back to the higher world by Melchisedec, the Great Receiver or Collector of Light, it being continually liberated by the spheres being made to turn more rapidly, that is to say by the quickening of evolution owing to the influx of Light. The substance of the Rulers is graphically described as “the breath of their mouths, the tears of their eyes, and the sweat of their bodies”—the matter out of which souls are made.

But as their power was gradually taken from them, their kingdom began to be dissolved; the Rulers therefore began to devour their own matter, so that it should not be made into souls of men and so be purified, and in every way strove to delay the completion of the number of perfect souls—the crown of evolution. So it came to pass that they fought against the great soul of the Master as He passed through them, and so He changed them and their configurations and influences, “and from that hour they have not had the power to turn towards the purgation of their matter to devour it.”

“I took away a third part of their power; I changed their revolution; I shortened their circles, and caused their path to be lightened, and they were

greatly hurried, and were thrown into confusion in their path; and from that hour they have no more had the power of devouring the matter of the purgation of the brilliancy of their light.”

The Shortening of the Times.Thus had He shortened their times and hastened evolution. “For this cause I said unto you before, ‘I have shortened the times because of my Elect.’” The “Elect” (Pneumatics) are the perfect number of souls who shall receive the mysteries; indeed had not the times been shortened, “there would not have been a single material (hylic) soul saved, but they would have perished in the fire which is in the flesh of the Rulers.”

The Heavenly journey continued.After these explanations the Master continues the narrative of his heaven journey. All the great powers of the Æonic Spaces, when they saw what had happened to their Tyrants, adored and sang hymns to the interior of the interiors. And so He passed inward to the veils of the Thirteenth Æon. Here, outside this Space, He found Pistis Sophia, sitting alone, mourning and grieving because she had not been brought into the Thirteenth Æon, her proper region in the height. She was grieving because of the sufferings brought upon her by Arrogant, one of the three Triple Powers. But when she saw the radiant light-vesture of the Master, containing the whole glory of her mystery, the mystery of the Thirteenth Æon, she began to sing a song to the light which is in the height, which she had seen in the veil of the Treasure of Light. And as she sang, the veils of the Thirteenth Æon were drawn apart, and her syzygy, and her two-and-twenty

fellow-emanations within the Æon, making together four-and-twenty emanations who came forth from the Great Invisible Forefather and the two other great Triple Powers of that Space, gazed upon the light of His vesture.

Hereupon follows the mystic story of the sufferings of Pistis Sophia. In the beginning she was The Myth of Pistis Sophia. in the Thirteenth Æon with her companion Æons. By order of the First Mystery, she gazed into the height and saw the light of the veil of the Treasure of Light, and desired to ascend into that glorious realm, but could not. She ceased to do the mystery of the Thirteenth Æon and ever sang hymns to the Light she had seen.

Hereupon the Rulers in the Twelve Æons below hated her, because she had ceased to do their mystery—the mystery of intercourse or sexual union—and desired to go into the height and be above them all.

And Arrogant, the disobedient one, that one of the three Triple Powers of the Thirteenth Æon who The Enmity of Arrogant. refused to give the purity of his light for the benefit of others, but desired to keep it for himself and so be ruler of the Thirteenth Æon, led the onslaught against her. Arrogant is apparently the conservative power of the “matter” of this Space. He joined himself to the number of the Twelve Æons and fought against the Sophia. He sent forth a great power from his light and other powers from his matter, the reflections of the powers and emanations above, into Chaos; and caused the Sophia to look down into the lower regions, that she might see this power and imagine

it was the real Light to which she aspired. And so in ignorance she descended into matter, saying: “I will go into that region, without my consort, to take the light, which the Æons of Light have produced for me, so that I may go to the Light of lights, which is in the Height of heights.”

The Fall into Matter.Thus pondering she went forth from the Thirteenth Æon and descended into the Twelve; but they pursued her, and so she gradually descended to the regions of Chaos, and drew nigh to the light-power which Arrogant had sent below, to devour it. But all the material emanations of Arrogant surrounded her, and the light-power of Arrogant set to work to devour all the light-powers in the Sophia; “it expelled her light and swallowed it, and as for her matter they cast it into Chaos.” This light-power of Arrogant is that Ialdabaōth “of which,” says the Master, “I have spoken to you many times.”

And so Sophia was greatly weakened and beset and “cried out exceedingly, she cried on high to that Light of lights which she had seen in the beginning, in which she had trusted [hence is she called Pistis (Faith) Sophia], and began to sing songs of repentance,” whereby she might be converted or taken back to the Light.

The lengthy incident of the Pistis Sophia occupies pp. 42-181 of the Coptic translation, and her thirteen repentances and songs of praise are a mystical interpretation of a number of the Psalms of the Second Temple collection and of five of the Odes of Solomon.

To attain to the knowledge of the Light, the

human soul (as the world-soul before it) has to descend into matter (hylē). Hence the Sophia, desiring The Descent of the Soul. the Light, descends towards its reflection, from the Thirteenth Æon, through the Twelve, into the depths of Chaos or Unorder, where she seems in danger of entirely losing all her own innate light or spirit, being continually deprived of it by the powers of matter. Having descended to the lowest depths of Chaos, she at length reaches the limit, and the path of her pilgrimage begins to lead upward to spirit again. Thus she reaches the middle point of balance, and still yearning for the Light, rounds the turning point of her cyclic course, and changing the tendency of her thought or mind or nature, recites her penitential hymns or repentances. Her chief enemy is the false light—presumably the counterfeit spirit of which we shall hear later on—the desire-nature, which is assisted by four-and-twenty material powers, the reflections of the supernal projections, powers or co-partners of the Sophia, the whole looked at from without making an ordering into forty-nine.

The Sophia first utters seven repentances. At the fourth of these, the turning point of some sub-cycle of Its Repentance and Redemption. her pilgrimage, she prays that the image of the Light may not be turned from her, for the time is come when “those who turn in the lowest regions” should be regarded—“the mystery which is made the type of the race.”

At the sixth the Light remits her transgression; viz., that she quitted her own region and fell into Chaos. This perhaps refers to the dawning of the consciousness of the higher ego in the lower

personality. But as yet the command has not come from the First Mystery to free her entirely from Chaos. This may refer to the higher illumination when the consciousness of the true spiritual soul is obtained.

Therefore at the conclusion of her seventh repentance, where she pleads that she has done it all in ignorance, through her love for the Light, Jesus, her syzygy (without the First Mystery) raises her up to a slightly less confined region in Chaos, but Sophia still knows not by whom it is done.

It is only at the ninth stage that the First Mystery partly accepts her repentance and sends Jesus in the form of the Light to her help, so that she recognises it.

Her next four hymns are sung knowingly to the Light, and are of the nature of thanksgiving, and of declaration that justice will shortly overtake her oppressors, while at the same time she prays to be delivered wholly from her “transgression”—the lower desire-nature.

The Degrees of Purification.After the thirteenth repentance, Jesus again, of himself, without the First Mystery, emanated a brilliant power of light from Himself, and sent it to aid Sophia, to raise her still higher in Chaos, until the command should come to free her entirely. There are, therefore, as it seems, three degrees of purification from the chaotic elements of the lower nature.

Then, while Sophia pours forth hymns of joy, the power becomes a “crown to her head,” and her hylē The Light-Crown. (or material propensities) begins to be entirely purified, while the spiritual light-powers which she has succeeded in retaining during her long combat, join themselves with the new vesture of light which has descended upon her.

Then is the law fulfilled, and the First Mystery in His turn sent forth another great light-power, which joined with that already emanated by the Light, and it became a great light-stream. This stream was nothing else than the First Mystery Himself looking without, coming forth from the First Mystery looking within.

When all this is accomplished the Sophia is completely purified, and her light-powers are reestablished and filled with new light, by their own co-partner of light, that syzygy without whom Sophia in the beginning had thought to reach the Light of lights, unaided, and so fell into error.

But all is not yet over; the final victory is not yet won. For the higher she rises the stronger are the powers or projections sent against her; they proceed to change their shapes, so that she now has to struggle against still greater foes, which are emanated and directed by the subtlest powers of cosmos.

Thereupon Sophia is not only crowned but entirely surrounded with the light-stream, and further supported The Final Victory. on either hand by Michael and Gabriel, the “sun” and “moon.” The “wings of the great bird” flutter, and the “winged globe” unfolds its

pinions, preparatory to its flight. Thus the last great battle begins.

The First Mystery looking without directs her attack against the “cruel crafty powers, passions incarnate,” and makes the Sophia tread underfoot the basilisk with seven heads, destroying its hylē, “so that no seed can arise from it henceforth,” and casting down the rest of the opposing host.

Thereupon Sophia sings triumphant hymns of praise on being set free from the bonds of Chaos. Thus is she set free and remembers.

Still the great Self-willed one and Adamas, the Tyrant, are not yet entirely subdued, for the command has not yet come from the First Mystery looking within. Therefore does the First Mystery looking without seal their regions and those of their rulers “until three times are accomplished,” presumably until the end of the seven cycles or ages, of which the present is said to be the fourth, when the perfect number of those of humanity who reach perfection will pass into the interplanetary Nirvāṇa—to use a Buddhist term. This Nirvāṇa, however, is a state out of time and space, as we know them, and therefore can be reached now and within by very holy men who can attain the highest degree of spiritual contemplation. Then shall the Gates of the Treasure of the Great Light be opened and the heights be crossed by the pilgrim.

An otherwise unknown Story of the Infancy.In the course of the many interpretations of scripture given by the disciples and women disciples, Mary, the Mother of Jesus (“my mother according to matter, thou in whom I dwelt”), who is also

one of the women disciples, receives permission to speak and tells a quaint story of the Infancy, otherwise entirely unknown.

And Mary answered and said: “My Master, concerning the word which Thy power prophesied through David, to wit, ‘Mercy and truth are met together, righteousness and peace have kissed each other; truth hath flourished on the earth, and righteousness hath looked down from heaven’—Thy power prophesied this word of old concerning Thee.

“When Thou wert a child, before the Spirit had descended upon Thee, when Thou wert in the vineyard with Joseph, the Spirit came down from the height, and came unto me in the house, like unto Thee, and I knew Him not, but thought that He was Thou. And He said unto me, ‘Where is Jesus, my Brother, that I may go to meet Him?’ And when He had said this unto me I was in doubt, and thought it was a phantom tempting me. I seized Him and bound Him to the foot of the bed which was in my house, until I had gone to find you in the field—Thee and Joseph, and I found you in the vineyard; Joseph was putting up the vine poles.

“It came to pass, therefore, when Thou didst hear me saying this thing unto Joseph, that Thou didst understand, and Thou wert joyful and saidest, ‘Where is He, that I may see Him? Nay [rather] I am expecting Him in this place.’ And it came to pass, when Joseph heard Thee say these words, that he was disturbed.

“We went together, we entered into the house,

we found the Spirit bound to the bed, and we gazed upon Thee and Him, and found that Thou wert like unto Him. And He that was bound to the bed was unloosed; He embraced Thee and kissed Thee, and Thou also didst kiss Him; ye became one and the same being.”

At the end of the story of the Sophia, Mary asks: “My Master and Saviour, how are the four-and-twenty Invisibles [the co-powers of Sophia]; of what type, of what quality; or of what quality is their light?”

Of the Glory of Them of the Thirteenth Æon.And Jesus answered and said unto Mary: “What is there in this world which is comparable to them; or what region in this world is like unto them? Now, therefore, to what shall I liken them; or what shall I say concerning them? For there is nothing in this world with which I can compare them; nor is there a single form to which I can liken them. Indeed, there is nothing in this world which is of the quality of heaven. But, Amen, I say unto you, every one of the Invisibles is nine times greater than the Heaven [the lower firmament], and the Sphere above it, and the Twelve Æons all together, as I have already told you on another occasion.

“[Again] there is no light in this world which is superior to that of the sun. Amen, Amen, I say unto you, the four-and-twenty Invisibles are more radiant than the light of the sun which is in this world, ten thousand times, as I have told you before on another occasion; but the Light of the Sun in its true form, which is in the space of the Virgin of Light, is more

radiant than the four-and-twenty, … ten thousand times more radiant.”

The Master promises further, when he takes them through the various spaces of the unseen world, to bring them all finally into the Twin Spaces of the First Mystery, as far as the supreme Space of the Ineffable, “and ye shall see all their configurations as they really are, without similitude.”

“When I bring you into the region of the rulers of the Fate-Sphere, ye shall see the glory in which The Scale of Light. they are, and compared with their greatly superior glory, ye will regard this world as the darkness of darkness; and when ye gaze down on the whole world of men, it will be as a speck of dust for you, because of the enormous distance by which [the Fate-Sphere] will be distant from it, and because of the enormous superiority of its quality over it.”

And so shall it be in ever increasing glory of light with each higher space, the lower appearing as a speck of dust from its sublimity, as they are taken through the Twelve Æons, the Thirteenth Æon (or the Left), the Midst, the Right (sci., of the cosmic cross), the Light-world, and the Inheritance of Light within it.

Then Mary asks: “Master, will the men of this world who have received the mysteries of light be higher in Thy Kingdom than the emanations of the Treasure of Light?”

And in answer the Master explains the ordering and nature and functions of these great emanations, and how that, at the final time of the completion

of the æon and the ascension of the plērōma, these all shall have a higher place in His Kingdom; but this time has not yet come. But high above all of them the souls of men who have received the mysteries of light, shall take precedence.

The “Last” shall be “First.”And Mary said: “Master, my indweller of light hath ears, and I comprehend every word which Thou speakest. Now, therefore, O Master, concerning the word which Thou hast spoken, to wit, ‘All the souls of human kind which shall receive the mysteries of light, shall in the Inheritance of Light take precedence of all the Rulers who shall repent, and all them of the region of those who are on the Right, and the whole space of the Treasure of Light’; concerning this word, my Master, Thou hast said unto us aforetime, ‘The first shall be last and the last shall be first,’ that is, the ‘last’ are the whole race of men who shall be first in the Light-kingdom; so also they that are [now] in the space of the height are the ‘first.’”

The Three Supernal Spaces of the Light.The Master then continues in His conversation and tells them of the glorious beings and spaces, of which He will treat in detail in His further teaching, up to the inner Space of the First Mystery, but of those within these supernal spaces He will not treat in the physical consciousness, for “there is no possibility of speaking of them in this world”; nay, “there is neither quality nor light which resembleth them, not only in this world, but also no comparison in those of the Height of Righteousness.” He, however, in lofty language describes the greatness of the five

[paragraph continues] Great Supporters of the outer Space of the First Mystery, above or within which is the inner Space of the First Mystery, and above all the Space of the Ineffable.

To these supernal realms of the Inheritance shall come those who have received the light-mysteries, The Inheritance of Light. and each shall occupy the space according to the mystery he has received, a higher space or a lower according to the degree of the mysteries he has received; each shall have the power of going into all regions of the Inheritance below him, but not of ascending higher.

“But he who shall have received the complete mystery of the First Mystery of the Ineffable, that is The Mystery of the First Mystery. to say, the twelve mysteries of the First Mystery, one after another, … … . shall have the power of exploring all the orders of the Inheritance of Light, of exploring from without within, from within without, from above below, and from below above, from the height to the depth, and from the depth to the height, from the length to the breadth, and from the breadth to the length; in a word, he shall have the power of exploring all the regions of the Inheritances of Light, and he shall have the power of remaining in the region which he shall choose in the Inheritance of the Light-kingdom.

“Amen, I say unto you, this man, in the dissolution of the world, shall be King over all the orders of the The Gnosis of Jesus, the Mystery of the Ineffable. Inheritance of Light; and he who shall have received the Mystery of Ineffable, that man the is Myself.

Hereupon follows a magnificent recital of the perfect Gnosis of such a one, for:

“That Mystery knoweth why there is darkness, and why light.”

And so on, in great phrases describing the wisdom of the supreme Mystery, who knows the reason of the existence of all things: darkness of darkness and light of light; chaos and the treasure of light; judgment and inheritance of light; punishment of sinners and rest of the righteous; sin and baptisms; fire of punishment and seals of light; blasphemies and songs to the light; and so on through many pairs of opposites, ending with death and life.

But the recital of the greatness of the supreme Gnosis is not yet ended, for the Master continues: “Hearken, therefore, now further, O My disciples, while I tell you the whole Gnosis of the Mystery of the Ineffable.”

It is the Gnosis of pitilessness and compassion; of destruction and everlasting increase; of beasts and creeping things, and metals, seas, and earth, clouds and rain, and so on working downwards from man into nature and upwards through all the supernal realms.

The Disciples lose Courage in Amazement at the Glories of the Gnosis.But the disciples are amazed at the glories of the Gnosis of this greatest Mystery and lose courage. And Mary said: “O Master, if the Gnosis of all these things is in that Mystery, who is the man in this world who shall be able to understand that Mystery and all its gnoses, and the manner of all the words which thou hast spoken concerning it?”

And the Master said: “Grieve not, My disciples,

concerning the Mystery of that Ineffable, thinking that ye will not understand it. Amen, I say unto you, that Mystery is yours, and every one’s who shall give ear unto you, and shall renounce the whole world, and all the matter therein, who shall renounce all the evil thoughts that are therein, and shall renounce all the cares of this æon.

“Now, therefore, will I tell you: Whosoever shall renounce the whole world and all therein, and shall The Highest Mystery is the Simplest of All. submit himself to the Divinity, to him that Mystery of them shall be far more easy than all the mysteries of the Kingdom of Light; it is far simpler to understand than all the rest, and it is far clearer than them all. He who shall come to a knowledge of that Mystery, hath renounced the whole of this world and all its cares. For this cause have I said unto you aforetime: ‘Come unto Me all ye that are oppressed with cares and labour under their weight, and I will give you rest, for My burden is light and My yoke easy.”

Let them not be dismayed at the vast complexity of the emanation of the plērōma and the world-process, “for the emanation of the plērōma is its Gnosis.” Let but the Christ be born in their hearts by their forsaking the delights of the world, and they shall grow into the being of the plērōma and so possess all its Gnosis.

The Master then continues His description of the Gnosis of the Mystery of the Ineffable, resuming it at Concerning the One Word of the Ineffable. the point where He had broken off, and leading them higher and higher into the supernal heights through space after space, and hierarchy after hierarchy, of stupendous being and its emanation,

up to the Mystery itself, the First Mystery who knoweth why He came forth from the Last Limb of the Ineffable. All this, which He now recites simply, naming the great spaces and their indwellers, He promises to explain at length in His further teaching.

“Now, therefore, it is the Mystery of the Ineffable which knoweth why all of which I have spoken unto you hath come into existence; of a truth all this hath existed because of Him. He is the Mystery which is in them all; He is the emanation of them all, the re-absorption of them all, and the support of them all.

“This Mystery of the Ineffable is in all those of which I have spoken, and of which I shall speak in treating of the emanation of the plērōma. He is the Mystery which is in them all, and He is the One Mystery of the Ineffable. And the Gnosis of that which I have said unto you, and of what I have not yet spoken unto you, but of all of which I shall speak when treating of the [full] emanation of the plērōma, and the whole Gnosis of each of them, one after another, that is to say, why they exist—all this is the One Word (Logos) of the Ineffable.”

“The Mystery of the Ineffable is the One and Only Word, but there is another [Word] on the Tongue of the Ineffable; it is the rule of the interpretation of all the words which I have spoken unto you.”

It is then explained how that he who receives this One and Only Word. when he comes forth from

the body of the matter of the Rulers, becomes a great light-stream, and soars into the height; he The Glory of Him who Receive the Mystery. stands in no need of apology or symbol, for all powers bow down before the vesture of light in which he is clothed, and sing hymns of praise, and so he passes upwards and onwards, through all the Inheritances of Light, and higher still until he becometh one with the Limbs of the Ineffable. “Amen, I say unto you, he shall be in all the regions during the time a man can shoot an arrow.”

Hereupon follows a recital of the greatness of such a soul. Beginning with the words, “Though he be a man in the world, yet is he higher than all angels, and shall far surpass them all,” it recites in the same form all the grades of the supernal hierarchies of beings from angels upwards, and ends as follows:

“Though he be a man in the world, yet is he higher than the whole region of the Treasure, and shall be exalted above the whole of it.

“Though he be a man in the world, yet shall he be King with Me in My Kingdom. He is a man in the world but a King in the Light.

“Though he be a man in the world, yet is he a man who is not of the world.

“Amen, I say unto you, that man is Myself, and I am that man.”

And at the great consummation all such men “shall be fellow-kings with Me, they shall sit on My right hand and on My left in My Kingdom.

“Amen, I say unto you, these men are Myself, and I am these men,”

Of the Thrones in the Light-Kingdom.There then follows apparently an interpolation consisting of a quotation from some now unknown Gospel: “Wherefore have I said unto you aforetime, ‘In the place where I shall be, there also will be my twelve ministers, but Mary Magdalene and John the virgin shall be higher than all the disciples.’

“And all men who shall receive the Mystery in that Ineffable shall be on My left hand and on My right, and I am they and they are Myself.

“They shall be your equals in all things, and yet your thrones shall be more excellent than theirs, and My throne shall be more excellent than yours and [than those of] all men who shall have found the Word of that Ineffable.”

There are other Logoi.And Mary thinks that this must be the end of all things and the Gnosis of all gnoses, and so protests: “Master, surely there is no other Word of the Mystery of that Ineffable, nor any other Word of the whole Gnosis?”

The Saviour answered and said: “Yea, verily; there is another Mystery of the Ineffable and another Word of the whole Gnosis.” Nay, a multitude of Words, He might have added.

The Degrees of the Mysteries.Then Mary asks whether those who do not receive the Mystery of the Ineffable before they die, will enter the Light-kingdom. The Master answers that every one who receives a mystery of light, any one of them, shall after death find rest in the Light-world appropriate to his mystery, but no one who has not become a Christ will know the Gnosis of the whole plērōma, for “in all openness I am the Gnosis of the whole plērōma.”

So he who receives the first mystery of the First Mystery shall be King over the spaces of the First Saviour in the Light-realm, and so on up to the twelfth.

And Mary asks: “Master, how is it that the First Mystery hath twelve mysteries, whereas the Ineffable hath but one Mystery?”

The answer is that they are really one Mystery; this Mystery is ordered into twelve, and also into five, and again into three, while still remaining one; they are all different aspects or types of the same Mystery.

The two higher mysteries of the three not only ensure the possessor of them, when he leaves the The Boons they Grant. body, his appropriate lot in the Inheritance, but they further bestow boons with regard to others. If a man “perform them in all their configurations, that is to say when he shall have created those mysteries for himself,” they give the power of further enabling him to protect one who is not a participator in the Words of Truth, after his death, so that he shall not be punished. Of course such a man cannot “be brought into the Light until he have performed the whole polity of the light of those mysteries, that is to say, the strict renunciation of the world”; but he will be sent back again into “a righteous body, which shall find the God of Truth and the higher mysteries.”

But as for the highest mystery of all, “whosoever shall receive the Mystery which is in the whole The Limbs of the Ineffable. Space of the Ineffable, and also all the other sweet mysteries which are in the Limbs of that Ineffable,

of which I have not yet spoken unto you, both concerning their emanation, and the manner in which they are constituted, and the type of each of them as it is—I have not told you why It is called the Ineffable, or why It lies stretched out with all Its Limbs, or how many Limbs there are therein, or what are all Its regulations; nor will I say this unto you immediately, but only when I come to speak of the emanation of the [whole] plērōma; [then] will I tell you every detail, one by one, for It hath emanated together with Its own Word, just as it is in Itself, together with the sum total of all its Limbs, which belong to the regulation of the One and Only One, the changeless God of Truth—in the region, therefore, of which each shall receive the mystery in the Space of that Ineffable, there shall he inherit up to the region which he shall have received, [as far as] the whole region of the Space of that Ineffable; nor shall he give explanation throughout the regions, nor apology nor symbol, for [such souls] are without symbol and have no receivers.

So also for the second Space below this, the Space of the First Mystery looking within; such souls require no apology.

But for the third Space, the Space of the First Mystery looking without, each region has its receiver, explanation, apologies, and symbols, of all of which the Master will speak in due course.

“But when the plērōma is completed, that is to say, when the number of perfect souls shall be reached, and the Mystery shall be accomplished

according to which the plērōma is the plērōma, I shall pass a thousand years, according to the years of Light, reigning over all the emanations of the Light and the whole number of perfect souls who shall have received all the mysteries.”

Now “a day of the Light is a thousand years in the world, so that thirty-six myriads of years and a half a myriad of years of the world make a single year of the Light.”

The glories of the Light-kingdom with its three Realms and Kings is then described.

“Now the mysteries of these three Inheritances of Light are exceedingly numerous. Ye shall find them The Books of Ieou. in the two great Books of Ieou.” The higher ones He will reveal unto them; “but as for the rest of the lower mysteries, ye have no need thereof, but ye shall find them in the two Books of Ieou, which Enoch wrote when I spoke with him from the Tree of Knowledge, and from the Tree of Life, which were in the Paradise of Adam.”

Hereupon Andrew is in great amazement, and cannot believe that men of the world like themselves can have so high a destiny reserved for them, and can reach such lofty heights. “This matter, then, is hard for me,” he says.

When Andrew had said these words, the spirit of the Saviour was moved in Him, and He cried Ye are Gods. out and said: “How long shall I bear with you, how long shall I suffer you? Do ye still not know and are ye ignorant? Know ye not and do ye not understand that ye are all Angels, all Archangels, Gods and Lords, all Rulers, all the great

[paragraph continues] Invisibles, all those of the Midst, those of every region of them that are on the Right, all the Great Ones of the emanations of the Light with all their glory; that ye are all, of yourselves and in yourselves in turn, from one mass and one matter, and one substance; ye are all from the same mixture… .

“The great Light-emanations have not at all [in reality] undergone sufferings, nor changes of region, nor have they at all torn themselves asunder, nor poured themselves into different bodies, nor have they been in any affliction.

Of Souls in Incarnation.”Whereas, ye others, ye are the purgations of the Treasure, ye are the purgations of the region of them that are on the Right, ye are the purgations of all the invisibles and all the rulers; in a word, ye are the purgation of all of them. And ye have been in great afflictions and great tribulations, in your pourings into different bodies in this world. And after all these afflictions which came from yourselves, ye have struggled and fought, renouncing the whole world and all the matter that is in it; and ye have not held your hands in the fight, until ye found all the mysteries of the Kingdom of Light, which have purified you, and transformed you into refined light, most pure, and ye have become pure light itself… .

“Amen, I say unto you, the race of human kind is of matter. I have torn myself asunder, I have brought unto them the mysteries of light, to purify them, for they are the purgations of all the matter of their matter… .

“Now the Light-emanations have no need of any

mystery, for they are pure; but the human race hath need of purification, for all men are purgations of matter… .

“For this cause, therefore, preach ye to the The Preaching of the Mysteries. whole human race, saying, ‘Cease not to seek day and night, until ye have found the purifying mysteries’; and say unto them, ‘Renounce the whole world, and all the matter therein’, for he who buyeth and selleth in this world, he who eateth and drinketh of his own matter, who liveth in his own cares and all his own associations, amasses ever fresh matter from his matter, in that the whole world, and all that is therein, and all its associations, are exceedingly material purgations, and they shall make enquiry of every one according to his purity.”

This is followed by a long instruction on the nature of the preaching of the disciples to the world when the Master shall have gone unto the Light.

“Say unto them, ‘Renounce the whole world and The Burden of the Preaching. the matter that is in it, all its cares, all its sins, in a word, all the associations that are in it, that ye may be worthy of the mysteries of light, and be saved from all the torments which are in the judgments.’”

They are to renounce mourning, superstition, spells, calumny, false witness, boasting and pride, gluttony, garrulity, evil caresses, desire of avarice, the love of the world, robbery, evil words, wickedness, pitilessness, wrath, reviling, pillage, slandering, quarrelling, ignorance, villainy, sloth, adultery, murder, hardness of heart and impiety, atheism, magic potions, blasphemy, doctrines of error,—that they may escape

the torments of fire and ice and other graphic horrors of an elaborate hell, capped by the torments of the Great Dragon of the inexorable Outer Darkness, reserved for the greatest of sins, where such absolutely unrepentant souls “shall be without existence until the end” of the æon; they shall be “frozen up” in that state.

The Boundary Marks of the Paths of the Mysteries.Thus far for the negative side, the things to be abandoned; but for the positive, the things to be done, they are to: “Say unto the men of the world, ‘Be ye diligent, that ye may receive the mysteries of light, and enter into the height of the Kingdom of Light.’”

They are to be gentle, peacemakers, merciful, compassionate, to minister unto the poor and sick and afflicted, be loving unto God, and righteous, and live the life of absolute self-renunciation.

“These are all the boundary marks of the paths of them that are worthy of the mysteries of light.”

Unto such and such only are the mysteries to be given; the absolute condition is that they make this renunciation and repent.

“It is because of sinners that I have brought these mysteries into the world, for the remission of all the sins which they have committed from the beginning. Wherefore have I said unto you aforetime, ‘I came not to call the righteous.’”

The After-death State of the Uninitiated Righteous.The question now arises as to good men who have not received the mysteries, how will it be with them after death?

“A righteous man who is perfect in all righteousness,” answers the Master, yet who has not received

the mysteries of light, on going forth from the body, is taken charge of by the Receivers of Light—as distinguished from the Receivers of Wrath. “Three days shall they journey round with that soul in all the creatures of the world,” and pass it through all the elements of the judgments, instructing it therein, and then it shall be taken to the Virgin of Light and sealed with an excellent seal that it may be carried into a righteous body of the æons, so that it may in its next birth find the signs of the mysteries of light and inherit the Kingdom of Light for ever.

So with a man who has only sinned twice or thrice, he shall be sent back into the world according to the type of the sins he hath committed; “I will tell you these types when I shall come to explain the emanation of the plērōma” in detail.

“But Amen, Amen, I say unto you, even though a righteous man have not committed any sin at all, it is impossible to take him into the Kingdom of Light, because the sign of the Kingdom of the Mysteries is not with him.” He must have gnosis as well as righteousness.

The question next arises as to the sinner who has repented, and received the mysteries, and then has Of Those who Repent and again Fall Back. fallen away, and again repented, provided he be not a hypocrite; “Wilt Thou or not that we remit his transgressions unto seven times, and give him the mysteries again?”

The Saviour answered and said: “Remit ye his sin not only unto seven times, but Amen, I say unto you, remit ye it unto him many times seven times,

and each time give ye him the mysteries from the beginning, the mysteries which are in the first Space from the exterior; perchance ye will win the soul of that brother, so that he may inherit the Kingdom of Light… .

The Added Glories of the Saviour of Souls.”Amen, I say unto you, he who shall give life unto a single soul, and shall save it, in addition to his own proper light in the Kingdom of Light, he shall further receive an additional glory for the soul which he shall have saved, so that he who shall save a host of souls, in addition to his own proper glory in the Glory, he shall receive a host of additional glories for the souls which he shall have saved.”

Nay, they shall not only give the lower mysteries, but the higher mysteries as well, provided always the man sincerely repent and is not a hypocrite; all mysteries up to the three highest mysteries of the First Mystery, “for the First Mystery is compassionate and merciful-minded.”

Concerning the Irreconcilables.”But if that man again transgresseth, and is in any kind of sin, ye shall not remit his sin again from that hour, nor any more accept his repentance; let him be for you a stumbling-block and transgressor.

“For Amen, I say unto you, these three mysteries shall witness against his last repentance for him from that hour. Amen, I say unto you, the soul of that man shall have no more probation for the world of the height henceforth from that hour, but it shall dwell in the habitation of the Dragon of the Outer Darkness.”

In all of this the disciples have no choice; if they know a man is sincere, and not a hypocrite or merely

curious to know what kind of things the rites of the mysteries are, they must give him these mysteries and not withhold them, even if he be one who has never received any of the lower mysteries; for should they hide them from him, they will be subject to a great judgment.

Beyond the giving of these three higher mysteries they have no power, for they have not sufficient knowledge.

But the case of a man who has fallen away after receiving the highest mysteries they can give, is not Of the Infinite Compassion of the Divine. entirely hopeless; it is, however, in the hands of the First Mystery and the Mystery of the Ineffable alone.

These alone can accept repentance from such a man, and grant him the remission of his sins, for these Mysteries are “compassionate and merciful-minded, and grant remission of sins at any time.”

The question is now raised, Supposing they give the mysteries in error to those who are hypocrites Of those who Mimic the Mysteries. and who have deceived them and have afterwards made a mock of the mysteries “mimicking us and making forgeries of our mysteries,” what then are they to do?

In this case they are to appeal to the First Mystery, saying: “The mystery which we have given unto these impious and iniquitous souls, they have not performed in a manner worthy of Thy mystery, but they have [merely] copied [what we did]; give back [therefore] that mystery unto us, and make them for ever strangers to Thy Kingdom.”

In that hour the mysteries such impious souls

have received, shall return to them, and such people can receive pardon from no one save only the Mystery of the Ineffable.

In the case of the unbelieving friends and relatives of those who have received the mysteries, the latter may by their prayers and invocations procure a better lot in the after-death state for their relatives and friends, so that they may be sent back into conditions favourable for their receiving the mysteries in another life.

Can the Pains of Martyrdom be Avoided.It is then asked whether the mysteries will save the disciples from the pains of martyrdom. “For they are in exceeding great number who persecute us because of Thee, and multitudes pursue us because of Thy name, so that if we be submitted to the torture, we shall utter the mystery, that we may immediately depart from the body without suffering pain.”

The answer is not clear; every one who has accomplished the first (i.e., highest) of the three higher mysteries, in life, when the time comes to leave the body, shall soar into the Kingdom of Life without need of apology or sign. But it is not said that the pains of martyrdom can be avoided.

The Mystery of the Resurrection of the Dead.But they will be able to help others, for “not only ye, but all men who shall achieve the mystery of the resurrection of the dead, which healeth from demonian possessions, and sufferings, and every disease, [which also healeth] the blind, the lame, the halt, the dumb, and the deaf, [the mystery] which I gave unto you aforetime—whosoever shall receive of these mysteries and achieve them,

if he ask for any thing whatever hereafter, poverty or riches, weakness or strength, disease or health, or the whole healing of the body, and the resurrection of the dead, the power of healing the lame, the blind, the deaf, and the dumb, of every disease and of every suffering—in a word, whosoever shall achieve this mystery, if he ask any of the things which I have just said unto you, they shall at once be granted unto him.”

Hereupon the disciples cried out together in transport: “O Saviour, Thou excitest us with very The Transport of the Disciples. great frenzy because of the transcendent height which  Thou hast revealed unto us; and Thou exaltest our souls, and they have become paths on which we travel to come unto Thee, for they came forth from Thee. Now, therefore, because of the transcendent heights which Thou hast revealed unto us, our souls have become frenzied, and they travail mightily, yearning to go forth from us into the height to the region of Thy Kingdom.”

The Master continues His teaching, saying that the rest of the mysteries which have been committed That this Mystery is to be kept Secret. unto them they may give to others, but not the mystery of the resurrection of the dead and the healing of disease, “for that mystery pertaineth to the rulers, it and all its namings.” This they are to retain as the sign of their mission, so that when they do such wonder-deeds, “they will believe on you, that ye preach the God of perfection, and will have faith in all your words.”

The next point of instruction taken up is the question; “Who constraineth a man to sin?” This

The Constitution of Man.opens up the whole subject of the constitution of man, and gives rise to a very interesting exposition of Gnostic psychology.

When the child is first born, the “light-power,” “soul,” “counterfeit spirit,” and “body,” are all very feeble in it. “None of them hath sense enough as yet for any work, whether good or evil, because of the exceeding great weight of oblivion.”

The babe eateth of the delights of the world of the Rulers; the power absorbeth from the portion of the power which is in the delights, the soul from the portion of the soul in the delights, the counterfeit spirit from the portion of evil in the delights, and the body from the unperceptive matter in the delights.

There is also another factor called the “destiny,” which remains as it came into the world and takes nothing from the delights.

So, little by little, all these constituent elements in man develop, each sensing according to its nature. “The power senseth after the light of the height; the soul senseth after the region of mixed righteousness, which is the region of the Mixture (sci., of Light and Matter); and the counterfeit spirit seeketh after all vices, and desires, and sins; but the body hath no power of sensing unless it be an impulse to gain strength from matter.”

The power is evidently the higher mind, the soul the lower mind, and the counterfeit spirit the animal nature.

“The power within impelleth the soul to seek after the region of light and the whole Godhead;

whereas the counterfeit spirit draggeth down the soul, and persistently constraineth it to commit The Evil Desire which constraineth a Man to sin. every kind of iniquity and mischief and sin, and persisteth as something foreign to the soul, and is its enemy, and maketh it commit all these sins and evils”—bringing them into operation against the soul because of what it has done in the past; moreover, for the future, “it spurreth on the Workmen of Wrath to bear witness to all the sin which it will constrain the soul to commit. And even when the man sleepeth by night or by day, it plagueth him in dreams with the desires of the world, and causeth him to long after all the things of this world. In a word, it bindeth the soul to all the actions which the Rulers have decreed for it, and is the enemy of the soul, causing it to do what it would not.” This it is which constraineth a man to sin.

The “destiny” is that which leadeth the man to his death. Then come the Receivers of Wrath to lead that soul out of the body.

“And for three days the Receivers of Wrath travel round with that soul through all the regions, The Cycle of the After-death State of the Sinner. taking it through all the æons of the world; and the counterfeit spirit and destiny accompany that soul, but the power withdraws itself unto the Virgin of Light.”

The soul is then brought down into Chaos, and the counterfeit spirit becometh the receiver of that soul, and haunteth it, rebuking it in every punishment because of the sins which it hath caused it to commit; it is in exceeding great enmity to the soul.

The soul then rises higher, still always haunted

by the counterfeit spirit, until it comes to the Ruler of the Way of the Midst between the lower firmament and the earth-surface. Here it is still subjected to the punishments of its counterfeit spirit, according to its “destiny.”

It is then brought by the counterfeit spirit to the “light of the sun,“—the Way of the Midst being apparently the sublunary regions—and taken to the Judge, the Virgin of Light, according to the commandment of Ieou, the First Man; and “the Virgin of Light sealeth that soul and handeth it over to one of her receivers, and will have it carried into a body, which is the record of the sins which it hath committed.”

“Amen, I say unto you she will not suffer that soul to escape from transmigrations into bodies, until it hath given signs of being in its last cycle according to its record of demerit.”

And of the Initiated Righteous.In the case of a righteous soul, however, and one that hath received the higher mysteries of light, “when the time of that soul is come for its passing from the body, then the counterfeit spirit followeth after that soul, and also the destiny. They follow after it in the way whereby it shall pass into the height.

“And before it goeth far into the height, it uttereth the mystery of the breaking of the seals and all the bonds of the counterfeit spirit, whereby the Rulers bind it to the soul”; and so they cease to impede the soul, and the destiny departeth to its own region, to the Rulers of the Way of the Midst, and the counterfeit of the spirit to the Rulers of the Fate-Sphere.

[paragraph continues] And so it becometh a glorious light-stream and passeth up to its inheritance, for “the receivers of that soul, who pertain to the light, become wings of light for that soul,” and will be a vesture of light for it. Such a soul requires no seals or apologies.

But one that hath received the lower mysteries only, requires such apologies and seals, all of which the Master promises to give them in His detailed exposition of the emanation of the plērōma. For the present He simply states what spaces have to be traversed and what are the rulers.

Mary compares some of the statements with former sayings, including one which the Master “Agree with thine Enemy.” spake “unto us aforetime by the mouth of Paul our brother.” She further interprets the saying, “Agree with thine enemy whilst thou art in the way with him, lest at any time thine enemy deliver thee to the judge, and the judge deliver thee to the officer, and the officer cast thee into prison; thou shalt not come out thence till thou hast paid the uttermost farthing,” as referring to the Judge, the Virgin of Light, and the recasting of the soul into another body, for that no soul is free from transmigration until it gives signs of being in its last cycle.

Mary next enquires as to the nature of the mysteries of the baptisms which remit sins, and the Master replies:

“The counterfeit spirit beareth witness to every sin which the soul hath committed; not only doth The Stamping of the Sins on the Souls. it bear witness concerning the sins of the souls, but it sealeth every sin that it may be stamped on the

soul, so that all the rulers of the punishments of sinners may know that it is the soul of a sinner, and may be informed of the number of sins which it hath committed, by the number of the seals which the counterfeit spirit hath stamped upon it, so that they may chastise it according to the number of sins which it Bath committed. This is the fashion in which they treat the soul of the sinner.

The Burning Up of the Sins by the Fires of the Baptism Mystery.”Now, therefore, when a man receiveth the mysteries of the baptisms, those mysteries become a mighty fire, exceedingly fierce, wise, which burneth up sins; they enter into the soul secretly and devour all the sins which the counterfeit spirit hath implanted in it.

“And when the fire hath purified all the sins which the counterfeit spirit hath implanted in the soul, the mysteries enter into the body occultly, that the fire may secretly pursue after the pursuers and cut them off with the body. They chase after the counterfeit spirit and the destiny, to separate them from the power and the soul, and place them with the body, so that the counterfeit spirit, the destiny, and the body may be separated into one group, and the soul and power into another. And the mystery of baptism remaineth between the two, and separateth the one from the other, in order that it may cleanse them and make them pure, that the soul and power may not be fouled in matter.”

It is then further explained that all the twelve and other mysteries of the First Mystery and of the Ineffable are still higher than the mysteries of the

baptisms; but all of this will be explained in a further teaching.

Mary gives interpretations of passages of scripture by the light of the new teaching, the opportunity being offered by a recapitulation of some of the points by the Master, with enquiry as to. whether they have well understood. Especially is the unending compassion of the highest Mysteries insisted upon.

“If even a king of to-day, a man of the world, granteth boons unto them who are like unto him, The Infinite Forgiveness of Sins. if he moreover granteth pardon unto murderers, and them that are guilty of intercourse with males, and other horrible and capital crimes; if, I say, it is in the power even of one who is a man of the world to act thus, much more then have that Ineffable and that First Mystery, who are lords of the whole plērōma, power over everything to do as they will, and grant remission of sin unto every one who shall have received the Mystery.

“Again, if even a king of to-day investeth a soldier with a royal mantle, and sendeth him to foreign regions, and the soldier there committeth murders and other grave offences worthy of death, and yet they are not brought home to him, because he weareth the royal mantle, how much more, then, [is it the case with] them who are mantled in the mysteries of the vestures of that Ineffable, and those of the First Mystery who are lords over all them of the height and all them of the depth!”

Thereupon the Master makes trial of Peter, to see whether he is compassionate, in the case of a woman

who had fallen away after receiving the mystery of baptism, and Peter comes out of the trial successfully.

But Delay not to Repent.It is then explained that the lot of a man who has received the mysteries and fallen away and not repented, is far worse than that of the impious man who has never known them. As to those who are indifferent, thinking they have many births before them and need not hasten, the Master bids the disciples:

“Preach ye unto the whole world, saying unto men: ‘Strive together that ye may receive the mysteries of light in this time of stress, and enter into the Kingdom of Light. Put not off from day to day, and from cycle to cycle, in the belief that ye will succeed in obtaining the mysteries when ye return to the world in another cycle.’

For at a Certain Time the Gates of the Light will be shut.”Such men know not when the number of perfect souls [shall be filled up]; for when the number of perfect souls shall be completed, I will then shut the Gates of the Light, and from that time none will be able to come in thereby, nor will any go forth thereafter, for the number of perfect souls shall be [completed], and the mystery of the First Mystery be perfected—[the mystery] whereby all hath come into existence, and I am that mystery.

“From that hour no one shall any more enter into the Light, and none shall come forth, in that the time of the number of perfect souls shall be fulfilled, before I set fire to the world, that it may purify the coons, and veils, the firmaments and the whole world, and also all the matters that are still in it, the race of human kind being still upon it.

“At that time, then, the faith shall show itself forth more and more, and also the mysteries in those days. And many souls shall pass through the cycles of transmigrations of body and come back into the world in those days; and among them shall be some who are now alive and hear Me teach concerning the consummation of the number of perfect souls, [and in those days] they shall find the mysteries of light, and shall receive them. They shall mount up to the Gates of Light, and shall find that the number of perfect souls is complete, which is the Consummation of the First Mystery and the Gnosis of the Plērōma; they will find that I have shut the Gates of Light, and that from that hour no one can come in or go forth thereby.

“Those souls then will cry within through the Gates of Light, saying: ‘Master, open unto us.’ And “I know not whence ye are.” I will answer unto them, saying, ‘I know not whence ye are.’ And they will say unto Me, ‘We have received the mysteries, and we have fulfilled all Thy doctrine; Thou didst teach us on the high ways.’ And I will answer unto them, saying, ‘I know not who ye are, ye who have practised iniquity and evil even unto this day. Wherefore go [hence] into the Outer Darkness.’ Forthwith they will depart to the Outer Darkness, where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth.”

Mary then asks as to the type of the Outer Darkness and the number of the spaces and regions The Dragon of Outer Darkness. of punishment; and then follows an elaborate description of the space-dragon of this Outer Darkness, whose tail is in its mouth, and its twelve

dungeons, with their authentic faces and names of the rulers, of the doors and angels that watch at them, and what souls pass into the Dragon and how; it is explained how the names are all contained in one another, and what are the torments and degrees of the fires. Thereupon follows the teaching how the souls of the uninitiated may be saved, and how finally the Mystery will save even those who have no more chance of rebirth.

It is further explained how the initiated become light-flames and streams of light. Mary pleads for them who have neglected the mysteries; and the efficacy of the names of the twelve rulers of the dungeons is explained, and how that the souls who know the names escape from the Dragon and are taken to Ieou, and their subsequent fate.

The Draught of Oblivion.Then comes fresh instruction as to the Rulers of the Fate and the Draught of Oblivion—“the seed of iniquity, filled with all manner of desire and all forgetfulness …; and that deadly draught of oblivion becometh a body external to the soul, like unto the soul in every way, and its perfect resemblance, and hence they call it the counterfeit spirit.”

The manner of the fashioning of a new soul is then described, and how the power is inbreathed into it; this is set forth generally, and more detailed information is promised on a future occasion.

The Parents we are to Leave.It is further explained that the saying, “He who shall not leave father and mother and follow after Me,” refers to the “parents” or fashioners of the

soul and counterfeit spirit, and not our earthly parents, far less the parents of the light-power within—the Saviour and His mysteries.

Further information is also given as to the counterfeit spirit and its elemental builders, three-hundred and sixty-five in number; the embryonic stages of incarnation; the kārmic compulsion of the parents—the father and mother of the physical body; the occult process of gestation; the mode of incarnation of the various constituent elements in man; occult physiognomy; the nature of the destiny and how a man comes by his death; and various other questions of a like nature. And then the Saviour continues:

“Now, therefore, for the sake of sinners have I torn myself asunder and come into the world, to save Of the Books of Ieou again. them, and also because it is necessary that the righteous, who have never done evil, and have never committed sin, should find the mysteries which are in the Books of Ieou, which I made Enoch write down in Paradise, when I spake to him from the Tree of Knowledge, and from the Tree of Life, and which I made him deposit in the rock of Ararad; and I set Kalapataurōth, the Ruler that is over Skemmut, on whose head is the foot of Ieou—the latter surroundeth all the Æons and the Fate-Sphere—I set [then] this Ruler to preserve the Books of Ieou from the flood, and [also] lest any of the Rulers out of enmity should destroy them. These [books] will I give unto you, when I have finished telling you the emanation of the plērōma.”

But few only will comprehend the higher mysteries. “I tell you that there will be found one in a thousand and two in ten thousand for the consummation of the mysteries of the First Mystery.”

The Christ of the First of this Humanity to Enter the Light.Before the coming of the First Mystery no soul of this humanity had fully entered into the Light; none of the prophets or patriarchs had as yet entered into the Light, but they will be sent back into righteous bodies and so find the mysteries and inherit the Kingdom.

The treatise brings itself to an end with the following paragraphs:

“Mary answered and said: ‘Blessed are we before all men because of these great [truths] which Thou hast revealed unto us.’

“The Saviour answered and said unto Mary and all His disciples: ‘I will also reveal unto you all the grandeurs of the height, from the interior of the interiors to the exterior of the exteriors, that ye may be perfect in every gnosis, and in every plērōma, and in every height of the heights, and every deep of the depths.’

’Tis He who holds the Keys of the Mysteries.”And Mary answered and said to the Saviour: ‘Now we know, O Master, freely, surely, plainly, that Thou hast brought the keys of the mysteries of the Kingdom of Light, which remit the sins of souls, that they may be cleansed, and be transformed into pure light, and be brought into the Light.’”

SUMMARY OF THE EXTRACTS FROM THE BOOKS OF THE SAVIOUR.

THE first extract occurs on pp. 252-254 of the Askew Codex, and runs as follows:

“And they that are worthy of the mysteries which lie in the Ineffable, that is to say, those that The Immanent Limbs of the Ineffable.

have not emanated—they are prior to the First Mystery. To use a similitude and correspondence of speech that ye may understand, they are the Limbs of the Ineffable. And each is according to the dignity of its glory, the head according to the dignity of the head, the eye according to the dignity of the eye, the ear according to the dignity of the. ear, and the rest of the Limbs (or Members) [in like fashion]; so that it is manifest that ‘there are many members, but only one body.’ Of this I speak to you in a paradigm, a correspondence, and a similitude, but not in the reality of its configuration; I have not revealed the [whole] word in truth.

“But the Mystery of the Ineffable and every Limb which is in It—that is to say, they that The Christ is the Ineffable. dwell in the Mystery of the Ineffable and they that dwell in [that Ineffable]—and also the three Spaces which follow after them, according to the mysteries, in truth and verity, all that [is Myself]. I am the Treasure of all of them, apart from which there is no treasure, apart from which there is no individuality in the world; but there are other words [? logoi], other mysteries, and other regions.

The Gnosis of the Christ.”Now, therefore, Blessed is he [among men] who hath found the mysteries of the Space towards the exterior. He is a God, who hath found the words [? logoi] of the mysteries of the second Space in the midst. He is a Saviour and free of every space who hath found the words of the mysteries, the words of the third Space towards the interior. He is the very Plērōma itself (or more excellent than the universe)—the object of desire of all who are in that third Space—who hath found the Mystery in which they [all] are, and in which they are [all] set. Wherefore is he equal to [all of them]. For he hath found also the words [? logoi] of the mysteries, which I have set down for you in a similitude, namely, the Limbs of the Ineffable. Amen, I say unto you, he who hath found the words of these mysteries in the Truth of God [? the God of Truth], that man is chief in the Truth, he is its peer, because of these words and mysteries. The universe verily oweth its being to these words and mysteries. For which cause he who hath found the words of these mysteries, is equal to the Chief [of all]. It is the gnosis of the Gnosis of the Ineffable concerning which I speak unto you this day.”

The second series of extracts is far longer and comes at the end of the Codex, occupying pp. 357-390. It begins with the words:

The Initiation of the Disciples on the Mount.”It came to pass, therefore, after they had crucified Jesus, our Master, that He rose from the dead on the third day. And the disciples came together unto Him and besought Him, saying: ‘Master, have mercy upon us, for

we have left father and mother, and the whole world, and have followed Thee.’”

We are at once introduced to an atmosphere of ceremonies and invocations. Jesus stands by the Sea of the Ocean, surrounded by his disciples, male and female, and makes invocation with solemn prayer, saying: “Hear me, O Father, Father of all fatherhood, Boundless Light!” The prayer consists of the mystic vowels and formulæ interspersed with “authentic” names.

The disciples are grouped round Him, the women disciples stand behind, all clad in white linen robes; Jesus stands at an altar and with His disciples turns to the four quarters, invoking three times the name IAŌ. The interpretation of which is: “I, The plērōma hath gone forth; A, They shall return within; Ō, There shall be an end of ends.”

This is followed by a mystic formula, which is interpreted as: “O Father of every fatherhood of the boundless [light-spaces], hear Me because of My disciples, whom I have brought into Thy presence, that they may believe in all the words of Thy truth; grant unto them all things for which I have cried unto Thee, for I know the Name of the Father of the Treasure of Light.”

Then Jesus, whose mystery-name is Aberamenthō, invokes the Name of the Father of The First Veil is Drawn Aside. the Treasure, saying: “Let all the mysteries of the rulers, authorities, archangels, and all the powers and all the works of the Invisible Gods [their three mystery-names being

given] withdraw themselves and roll themselves on to the right.”

Thereupon all the lower regions speed to the west, to the left of the disk of the sun and of the moon.

The disk of the sun is symbolically described as a vast dragon with its tail in its mouth, mounted on seven powers, and drawn by four others figured as horses. The car of the moon is figured as a ship, its helms, or steering oars, being two dragons, male and female; it is drawn by two. oxen, and steered by a babe on the poop, and at the prow is the face of a cat.

They enter the Way of the Midst.And Jesus and His disciples soar aloft into the aërial regions, the Way of the Midst, and come to the first order of the Way of the Midst.

The Ordering of the Fate-Sphere is Described.Here the disciples are instructed on the nature of this space and its rulers. They are told that above them there are Twelve Æons, six being ruled by Adamas and six by Iabraōth. The six under Iabraōth have repented and practised the mysteries of light, and have therefore been carried by Ieou, “the father of My father,” to a pure atmosphere near the light of the sun. The six under Adamas have refused the mysteries of light, and persisted in the mystery of intercourse, or sexual union, and procreated rulers and archangels, and angels, workmen, and decans. They have accordingly been bound by Ieou in the Fate-Sphere. There are now three hundred and sixty of this brood, and again eighteen hundred (1800 = 360 × 5) in each æon. Over them Ieou has set five other Great Rulers, called in the world of human kind by these names: Kronos, Arēs,

[paragraph continues] Hermēs, Aphroditē, and Zeus. Their incorruptible mystery-names and their genesis is also given.

Zeus is the head of the four, for Ieou reflected “that they had need of a helm to steer the world and the æons of the spheres.” Zeus is good, and passes three months in the revolutions of the remaining four ruling powers, “so that every ruler in which he cometh is freed from his iniquity.” The peculiarity of Zeus is that he has two æons for his habitation.

All this refers to the ordering of the Fate-Sphere; but Mary, who is also in these Extracts represented as the chief questioner, desires to be informed as to why the aërial Ways of the Midst, in which they are, and which lie below the Fate-Sphere, are “set over great torments.” She beseeches the Saviour to have mercy upon them, “lest the receivers carry off our souls to the judgments of the Ways of the Midst.”

The Master in answer promises to give them the mysteries of all gnosis: the mystery of the Twelve All Mysteries up to those of the Light-Treasure are Promised them. Æons of the Rulers, their seals, their numbers, and the manner of invocation to enter into their regions; in like manner the mystery of the Thirteenth Æon (the Left); the mystery of the Baptism of them of the Midst; the mystery of the Baptism of them of the Right; and the great mystery of the Treasure of Light.

“I will give unto you all the mysteries and every gnosis, that ye may be called the Sons of the Plērōma, perfect in every gnosis and every mystery. Blessed indeed are ye beyond all men who are on the earth, for the Sons of Light have come in your time.”

In these Ways of the Midst are further bound

The Punishments of the Ways of he Midst.by Ieou three hundred and sixty of the brood of Adamas, and five great rulers are further established over them, in a sort of reflection of the space above. The authentic names, types, and sub-hierarchies of these five are given. It is explained how all is ordered by Ieou, who is the providence of all the rulers and gods and powers which are in the matter of the Light of the Treasure, and by Zorokothora (Melchizedec), the legate of all the light-powers which are purified among the Rulers. These two great Lights descend at appointed seasons, to gather together the pure radiance of the light from those they have cleansed among the Rulers; this is done when the number and time of their task come to pass. But when the great Lights withdraw again, then the Rulers again rebel because of the “wrath of their iniquity,” and march against the light-powers of the souls, and “hurry off all the souls that they can harry and ravish, to destroy them in the smoke of their darkness and their evil fire.”

The Duration of the Punishments.The times that souls must pass in each of these regions of punishment of the five dæmonial hierarchies are given, and how these times are brought to an end. To take the first as an example: “It cometh to pass after these years, when the sphere of the Little Sabaōth (that is to say, Zeus) revolveth so as to come into the first æon of the Sphere, which is called in the world the Ram of Bubastis (that is to say, Aphroditē); when, then, she [Aphroditē] shall have come into the seventh house of the Sphere, which is the Balance, [it cometh to pass that] the veils between them of the Right and

them of the Left are drawn aside, and there glanceth forth from the height, among them of the Right, the Great Sabaōth, the Good, [lord] of the whole world and of all the Sphere. But before he glanceth forth, he gazeth down on the regions of Paraplēx [the ruler of the first dæmonian hierarchy], that they may be dissolved and perish, and that, all the souls which are in her torments may be brought forth and again led into the Sphere, for they are perishing in the torments of Paraplēx.”

And so for the other four of the five, with appropriate modifications. It appears that Ieou and Melchizedec are powers behind or symbolized by the sun and moon.

“These then are the operations of the Ways of the Midst concerning which ye have questioned Me.”

And when the disciples had heard this, they bowed down and adored Him, saying: “Save us, The Disciples Pray for Mercy to Sinners. O Master, have mercy upon us, that we may be preserved from these malignant torments which are prepared for sinners. Woe unto them! woe unto the children of men! for they are like the blind feeling in the darkness, and seeing not. Have mercy upon us, O Master, in the great blindness in which we are, and have mercy upon the whole race of human kind; for they lie in wait for their souls, as lions for their prey, to tear them in pieces and make food for their torments, because of the forgetfulness and ignorance in which they are. Have mercy, therefore, upon us, O Master, our Saviour, have mercy upon us, preserve us from this great stupor!”

Jesus said unto His disciples: “Have courage, fear not, for ye are blessed; nay, I will make you lords over all these, and place them in subjection under your feet. Ye remember that I have already said unto you before My crucifixion: ‘I will give unto you the keys of the kingdom of the heavens.’ Now again I say unto you, I will give them unto you.”

They Enter an Atmosphere of Exceeding Great Light.When Jesus had thus spoken, He chanted an invocation in the Great Name, and the regions of the Ways of the Midst were hidden from view and Jesus and His disciples remained in an atmosphere of exceeding great light.

Jesus said unto His disciples: “Come unto Me.” And they came unto Him. He turned towards the four angles of the world; He uttered the Great Name over their heads, and blessed them and breathed on their eyes. Jesus said unto them: “Look up, and mark what ye see!”

The Vision of the Baptism Mysteries.And they raised their eyes unto the height and saw a great light, exceedingly brilliant, which no man in the world could describe.

He said unto them a second time: “Look into the light, and mark what ye see!”

They said: “We see fire and water, and wine and blood.”

Jesus, that is to say Aberamenthō, said unto His disciples: “Amen, I say unto you, I have brought nothing into the world when I came, save this fire and water, this wine and blood. I brought down the water and fire from the region of the Light of light, from the Treasure of Light; I brought down the wine and the blood from the region of Barbēlō.

[paragraph continues] And shortly after My Father sent unto Me the Holy Spirit in the form of a dove.

“The fire, the water, and the wine are for cleansing all the sins of the world; the blood I had as a sign of the body of human kind, and I received it in the region of Barbēlō, the great power of the Divine Invisible [? the Thirteenth Æon]; while the Spirit draweth all souls and bringeth them into the region of Light.”

This is the “fire” He came to “cast on the earth” according to a former saying; this the “living water” the Samaritan woman should have asked for; this the “cup of wine” in the eucharist; this the “water” that came from His side.

“These are the mysteries of the light which remit sins”—that is to say, their names merely.

After this Jesus again gives the command that the powers of the Left return to their own region, They Return to Earth. and the disciples find themselves once more on the Mount of Galilee.

Hereupon Jesus celebrates the mystic eucharist and the first Baptism of Water, with ceremonies The Celebration of the Mystic Eucharist. and invocations almost identical to those in the Codex Brucianus. The disciples enquire further as to the nature of the Baptism of Incense [? Fire], the Baptism of the Holy Spirit, and the Spiritual Chrism, and ask that the “Mystery of the Light of Thy Father” be revealed to them.

Jesus said unto them: “As to these mysteries which ye seek after, there is no mystery which is The Mysteries that are to be Revealed. higher than them. They will bring your souls that into the Light of lights, into the regions of Truth

and Righteousness, into the region of the Holy of all Holies, into the region where there is neither female nor male, nor form in that region, but only Light, unceasing, ineffable.

“No mystery is higher than the mysteries ye seek after, save only the mystery of the Seven Voices and their Nine-and-Forty Powers and Numbers; and the Name which is higher than them all, the Name which sums up all their names, all their lights, and all their powers.”

The Punishments of Sinners in the Lower Regions and the Evil Bodies the Receive when Reborn. Here follows a lacuna, and the text is resumed in the middle of a totally different subject. It treats of the punishment of him that curseth, of the slanderer, of the murderer, of the thief, of the contemptuous, of the blasphemer, of him who hath intercourse with males, and of a still fouler act of sorcery, the mention of which stirs the infinite compassion of the Master to wrath and denunciation.

The few remaining pages of the Codex are taken up with a description of the after-death state of the righteous man who has not received the mysteries; a man must suffer for each separate sin, but even the greatest of sinners, if he repent, shall inherit the Kingdom. The time favourable for the birth of those who shall find the mysteries is described.

The Cup of Wisdom.As for the righteous man who has not been initiated, in his next birth he shall not be given the draught of oblivion, but “there cometh a receiver of the little Sabaōth, the Good, him of the Midst; he bringeth a cup full of intuition and wisdom, and also prudence, and giveth it to the soul, and casteth the soul into a body which will not be

able to fall asleep and forget, because of the cup of prudence which hath been given unto it, but will be ever pure in heart and seeking after the mysteries of light, until it hath found them, by order of the Virgin of Light, in order [that that soul] may inherit the Light for ever.”

The Extracts end with the disciples again beseeching Jesus to have mercy upon them; and The Note of a Scribe. the whole Codex is terminated by the note of a scribe describing the preaching of the apostles:

“They went forth three by three to the four points of heaven; they preached the Glad Tidings of the Kingdom in the whole world, the Christ being active with them in the words of confirmation and the signs and wonders which accompanied them. And thus was known the Kingdom of God in all the land and in all the world of Israel, [and this] is a testimony for all the nations which are from the east even unto the west.”

SUMMARY OF THE FRAGMENTS OF THE BOOK OF THE GREAT LOGOS ACCORDING TO THE MYSTERY.

The Book of the Gnoses of the Invisible God.THE first page is headed with the beautiful words: “I have loved you and longed to give you Life,” and is followed by the statement: “This is the Book of the Gnoses (pl.) of the Invisible God”; it is the Book of the Gnosis of Jesus the Living One, by means of which all the hidden mysteries are revealed to the elect. Jesus is the Saviour of Souls, the Logos of Life, sent by the Father from the Light-world to mankind, who taught His disciples the one and only doctrine, saying: “This is the doctrine in which all Gnosis dwelleth.”

This is evidently an introduction written by an editor or compiler; immediately after there begins a dialogue between Jesus and the disciples.

Jesus saith: “Blessed is the man who crucifieth the world and doth not let the world crucify him.”

The Hidden Wisdom.He then explains that such a man is he who hath found His Word, and fulfilled it according to the will of the Father. The apostles beg the Master to tell them this Word, for they have left all and followed Him; they desire to be instructed in the Life of the Father.

Jesus answers that the Life of His Father consists in their purifying their souls from all earthly stain, and making them to become the Race of the Mind, so that they may be filled with understanding, and by

[paragraph continues] His teaching perfect themselves, and be saved from the Rulers of this world and its endless snares. Let them then hasten to receive the Gnosis He is to impart—His Word—for He is free from all stain of the world.

The disciples break into praises of the Master—as the Light shining in the daylight—who hath enlightened their hearts until they receive the Light of Life, by means of the Gnosis which teacheth the hidden wisdom of the Lord.

Jesus saith: “Blessed is the man who knoweth this [Word] and hath brought down the Heaven, A Dark Saying is Explained. and borne the earth and raised it heavenwards; and it [the Earth] becometh the midst, for it is a nothing.’”

The Heaven is explained as being the invisible Word of the Father. They who know this—(who become children of the true Mind)—bring down Heaven to Earth. The raising of Earth to Heaven is the ceasing from being an earthly intelligence, by receiving the Word of these Gnoses (pl.) and becoming a Dweller in Heaven. Thus will they be saved from the Ruler of this World, and he will become the midst (that is to say, perhaps, that they will be above the Ruler and no longer subject to him as heretofore; he will be a “nothing” to them, that is to say, have no effect on them). Nay, the evil powers will envy them because they know Him, that He is not of this world and that no evil cometh from Him. But as for those who are born in the flesh of unrighteousness (and are not children of the Righteous Race, those of the second birth), they have no part in the Kingdom of the Father.

The Flesh of Ignorance.Thereupon the disciples are in despair, for they have been born “according to the flesh” and have known Him only “according to the flesh.” But the Master explains that not the flesh of their bodies is meant, but the flesh of unrighteousness and ignorance.”

The disciples ask to be instructed in the nature of ignorance (ἀγνοία, the opposite of gnosis, γνῶσις), and the Master tells them that, to understand this great mystery, they must first put on His virginity and righteousness, and His robe (of glory), and seek to understand the teaching of the Word, whereby they will learn to know Him in the Fullness (Plērōma) of the Father.

The apostles answered and said, “Lord, Jesus, Thou Living One, teach us the Fullness and it sufficeth us.”

Here unfortunately the text breaks off and pages are lost; nowhere in the MS. is a direct continuation to be found.

Taking Schmidt’s Second Book of Ieou first, we are introduced to the following narrative.

The Mysteries of the Treasure of Light.Jesus bids the twelve disciples and also the women disciples to surround Him, and promises to reveal to them the great mysteries of the Treasure of Light, which no one in the Invisible God knows (that is to say, no one even of the powers of the Thirteenth Æon—the Æon which surrounds or is beyond or within the Twelve Æons—over which the Invisible God is ruler). If these mysteries are consummated, neither the Rulers of the Twelve Æons nor those of the Invisible God can endure them nor comprehend them,

for they are the great mysteries of the interior of the interiors of the Treasure of Light. When these are consummated, the Receivers of the Light-treasure come and take the soul from the body, and bear it through all inferior spaces into the Light-treasure. Yea, the sins of that soul, whether conscious or unconscious, are blotted out, and the soul becomes pure Light. And not only does the purified soul pass through all inferior spaces, but also within into the Light-realm, ever inward, within all its spaces, orders, and powers, to the space of the Uncontainables in the innermost space of the Light-treasure.

These mysteries are to be guarded with utmost secrecy, and revealed to none who are unworthy; To be Revealed to the Worthy Alone. neither to father nor mother, to sister nor brother, nor to any relative; neither for meat nor drink, neither for woman nor gold nor silver, nor anything in this world. Beyond all to no sorcerer, those who practise certain most foul rites, whose God is the son of the Great Ruler, Sabaōth Adamas—the enemy of the Kingdom of Heaven, the chief of the six non-repentant Rulers. The mystery-name of this power is given and its monstrous form described.

Those alone are worthy of the mysteries of the Light-treasure (the emanation of the Unapproachable God) who have abandoned the whole world and all that pertains thereto, its gods and powers, and have centred their whole faith in the Light, giving ear to one another, and submitting themselves the one to the other, as do the children of the Light.

Now inasmuch as the disciples have left father

The Lesser Mysteries.and mother and brethren and all their possessions, and have followed Him and fulfilled His commandments, Jesus promises that He will reveal to them the mysteries as follows: The mystery of the Twelve Æons and their Receivers, and the mode of their invocation, so that the disciples may pass through their spaces; the mystery of the Invisible God (the Thirteenth Æon) and his Receivers (them of the Left), etc.; of them of the Middle, etc.; of them of the Right. But before all He will give them the mysteries of the three Baptisms—the Baptism of Water, the Baptism of Fire, and the Baptism of the Holy Spirit. Moreover He will give them the Mystery of Withdrawing the Malice or Naughtiness (κακία) of the Rulers, and thereafter the Mystery of the Spiritual Chrism.

The Good Commandments.But they must remember that, when they in turn give these mysteries to others, they must command them not to swear falsely, nor even to swear at all; neither to fornicate nor commit adultery; neither to steal nor covet other men’s goods; neither to love silver nor gold, nor invoke the names of the seventy-two evil Rulers or of their angels for any purpose; not to rob, nor to curse, nor calumniate falsely, nor to rail, but to let their yea be yea and their nay nay; in a word, they must fulfil the good commandments.

The disciples remind Jesus that His first promise had been that they should be given the mysteries of the Treasure of Light, the greater, which are above these lower mysteries of which He has spoken.

Seeing then that the disciples have not only

abandoned all things in the world and kept all the commandments, but have further now followed Him The Greater Mysteries.for twelve years, Jesus assures them that He will further give them the mysteries of the Light-treasure, to wit: The mystery of the Nine Guardians of the three Gates of the Light-treasure and the way of their invocation, so that they may pass through their spaces; the mystery of the Child of the Child, etc.; of the Three Amens; of the Five Trees; of the Seven Voices; the will (? mystery) of the Forty-nine Powers; the mystery of the Great Name of all names, that is of the Great Light which contains, or is beyond, the Treasure of Light. The master-mysteries of the Light-treasure are those of the Five Trees and of the Seven Voices and of the Great Name. There is, however, yet another supreme Mystery, which bestows upon a man all the rest—the Mystery of the Forgiveness of Sins; this Mystery transmutes the soul into pure light, so that it may be received into the Light of lights.

Such souls have already inherited the Kingdom of God while still on earth; they have their share The Powers they Confer. in the Light-treasure and are immortal Gods; and at death, when they leave the body, all the Æons disperse and flee to the west, to the left, until their souls arrive at the Gates of the Light-treasure. And the Gates are opened to them, and the Wardens give them their seals and their Great Name. So they pass within successively through the various Orders, where they receive the successive seals and master-words—within into the Five Trees and Seven Voices; yea, still farther

within, to the Orders of the Parentless, to the spaces of their inheritance—the Order of the Thrice-spiritual; until they reach the space of the Ieou, the Lord over the whole Treasure—the middle Treasure; thence ever within to the inner Treasures—the spaces of the interior of the interiors, the within of the within, to the Silences, to Peace Eternal, in those Everlasting Spaces.

All of these mysteries Jesus promises to give to His disciples, that they may be called “Children of the Fullness (Plērōma) perfected in all mysteries.”

The Master then gathers His disciples, men and women, round Him with the words: “Come all of you and receive the three Baptisms, ere I tell you the mystery of the Rulers!”

The Mystic Rite of the Baptism of the Water of Life.He bids them go to Galilee and find a man or woman in whom the greater part of evil (or the superfluity of naughtiness) is dead, that is to say, who has ceased from intercourse or sexuality (συνουσία), and receive from such a one two jars of wine and bring them to the place where He is, and also two vine branches.

They do so, and the Master sets forth a place of offering (θυσία), placing one wine jar on the right and one on the left, and strews certain berries and spices round the vessels; He then makes the disciples clothe themselves in white linen robes, puts a certain plant into their mouths, and the number of the Seven Voices and also another plant in their hands, and ranges them in order round the sacrifice.

Jesus then spreads a linen cloth, and on it places a cup, and bread or loaves according to the number

of the disciples; He surrounds this with olive-branches, and also puts wreaths of olive-branches on the heads of His disciples. He next seals their foreheads with a certain seal (the diagram of which., authentic name, and interpretation of it—also in the secret cypher—are given).

The Master then turns with his disciples to the four corners of the world, and the disciples are commanded to set their feet together (an attitude of prayer). He then offers a prayer which is prefixed with an invocation in the mystery-language, interspersed with triple Amens, and continues as follows:

“Hear Me, My Father, Father of all fatherhood, Boundless Light, who art in the Treasure of Light May the Supporters [or Ministers (παραστάται)] come, who serve the Seven Virgins of Light who preside over the Baptism of Life! [The mystery-names of the Supporters are here given.] May they come and baptize My disciples with the Water of Life of the Seven Virgins of Light, and wash away their sins and purify their iniquities, and number them among the heirs of the Kingdom of Light! If now Thou hast heard Me and hast had pity on My disciples, and if they have been numbered among the heirs of the Kingdom of Light, and if Thou hast forgiven their sins and blotted out their iniquities, then may a wonder be done, and Zorokothora come and bring the Water of the Baptism of Life into one of these wine-jars!”

The wonder takes place, and the wine in the right-hand jar becomes water; and Jesus baptizes them, and gives them of the sacrifice, and seals them

with the seal (? of the Supporters), to their great joy.

the Baptism of Fire.This is the Baptism of Water; we are next given a description of the Baptism of Fire. In this rite the vine-branches are used; they are strewn with various materials of incense. The eucharist is prepared as before, and the rest of the details are almost identical; the number of the Seven Voices is again used, but the seal is different.

The prayer is longer than the preceding one, but all to the same purpose; the supernal baptizers are no longer the Ministers of the Seven Virgins, but the Virgin of Life, herself, the Judge; she it is who gives the Water of the Baptism of Fire. A wonder is asked for in “the fire of this fragrant incense,” and it is brought about by the agency of Zorokothora, a name now interpreted as Melchizedec. What the nature of the wonder was, is not stated. Jesus baptizes the disciples, gives them of the eucharistic sacrifice, and seals their foreheads with the seal of the Virgin of Light.

The Baptism of the Holy Spirit.Next follows the Baptism of the Holy Spirit. In this rite both the wine jars and vine-branches are used; the details are otherwise very similar, the number of the Seven Voices being again employed. The supernal givers of the Baptism are not mentioned, but as the final sealing after the rite is with the seal of the Seven Virgins of Light, we may suppose that they are the givers of the Baptism. A wonder again takes place, but is not further specified.

After this we have the Mystery of Withdrawing

the Evil of the Rulers. There is here no mention of the eucharist, but in other respects the ceremonial The Mystery of Withdrawing the Evil of the Rulers. is very similar, and consists of an elaborate incense-offering. The number is that of the First Amen and the seal is very elaborate. The prayer asks that Sabaōth Adamas and all his chiefs may come, and take away their (the Rulers’) evil or naughtiness from the disciples. At the end of it the disciples are sealed with the seal of the Second Amen, and the Rulers have no longer any power over them; they have now become immortal, and can follow Jesus into all spaces whither they would go.

Jesus having now given the disciples the mysteries of the Baptisms, the mode of invoking the powers, their numbers, seals, and authentic names, promises to give them the apologies (defences or formula), whereby they will now be able to enter into the interior of the spaces or realms of these powers, and pass through them.

So far as they have been taught, they will be enabled, when out of the body, to pass through the The Powers the Lesser Mysteries Confer. realms apparently of the six Æons which have not repented, those of Sabaōth Adamas; these with all their rulers and indwellers will disperse before them. But on reaching the six great Æons (those apparently of Iabraōth, who repented and believed in the Light), they will be detained until they receive the Mystery of the Forgiveness of Sins.

The Mystery of the Forgiveness of Sins is said to have its being in the interior of the interior of the Treasures of Light; it is the perfect salvation of the soul. He who receives it is more excellent

The Mystery of the Forgiveness of Sins.than all the gods and powers of the twelve Æons of the Invisible God (the Ruler of the Thirteenth Æon). This Mystery is the Great Mystery of the Unapproachable God; it is the perfection of all mysteries, making the soul all-perfect.

It is this Mystery which will enable the disciples to pass into the Æons of the Invisible God—that is, the spaces that no physical eye can see, beyond the elements of water, fire, and air (or æther)—the baptismal mysteries of which have been already given.

The Power it Confers.But with the aid of the rite of the Mystery of the Forgiveness of Sins all the Æons will withdraw to the west, to the left, as veils before the eyes, up to the twelfth, which will then be so purified by the Light of the Light-treasure, that all the ways by which the disciples will have ascended will be purified; and moreover the exterior of the Light-treasure (the exterior being the Space of the Thirteenth Æon) will be revealed, and they will see Heaven from below. It will be at this point that Jesus will give them the apologies, seals, and numbers of the Mystery with their interpretations. And when they have received these and go out of the body, they will become pure light and soar upwards into the Light-treasure.

And then the Guardians of the Gates of the Treasure will open to them, and they will pass upwards and ever inwards through the following spaces, the powers therein rejoicing and giving them their mysteries, seals, and names of power: the Orders of the Three Amens, of the Child of

the Child, of the Twin Saviours, of the Great Sabaōth, of the Great Iaō the Good, of the Seven The Ordering of the Light Treasure. Amens, of the Five Trees, of the Seven Voices; the Orders of the Uncontainables, of the Impassables; the Orders of those who are before and beyond (in time and space) the Uncontainables and Impassables: the Orders of the Unstainables, and of those who are before and beyond them; the Orders of the Immovables, and of those who are before and beyond them; the Orders of the Parentless, and of those that are before them; the Orders of the Five Impressions, of the Three Spaces, of the Five Supporters, of the Thrice-spiritual, of the Triple Power, of the First Precept (or Statute), of the Inheritance, of the Silences and of Peace, of the Veils which are drawn before the Great King of the Light-treasure, unto the Great Man himself, the King of the whole Light-realm, whose name is Ieou.

These spaces and orderings are also mentioned in the Pistis Sophia treatise, but I have omitted them in the summary in order not to confuse the reader. The subject is exceedingly difficult, and no one has so far succeeded in reconstructing in detail the elaborate scheme of the Gnosis presupposed by the compiler or compilers of our treatises, owing in a great measure to the fragmentary state of the Codex Brucianus on the one hand and to the insufficient data of the Askew Codex on the other.

Still upwards and inwards are they to soar to the Space of the Great Light which surrounds or The Great Light. transcends the outer Treasure of Light itself. Ieou

is there too, he is the Great Light; this is the Second or inner Light Treasure. The guardians will open the Gates and they will pass into the Orders of the Triple Powers of the Second Light Treasure; thence inwards to the twelfth Order of the twelfth Great Power of the emanation of the True God. There are twelve Great Powers with twelve Chiefs in each of their Orders (of which the authentic names are given). These Twelve will stand apart in this Space and invoke the True God with this “Name” (? prayer), saying:

Invocation to the True God.”Hear us, O Father, Father of all fatherhood [Here follows a sentence in the mystery-language containing four of the vowels each seven times repeated—with the interpretation: That is to say, Father of all fatherhood, for the All hath come out of the Alpha, and will return to the Ōmega when the consummation of all consummations will take place.] We will now invoke Thy imperishable Names that Thou mayest send forth Thy great Light-power, and that it follow these Twelve Uncontainables [that is to say, the twelve disciples], for they have verily received the Mystery of the Forgiveness of Sins, and therefore are they not to be held back from approaching Thy Light-Treasure.”

Thereon the True God will send forth his Light-power; it will shine forth from behind the disciples, and cause all the Treasures of the Second Light-realm to withdraw, and they will reach the Space of the True God.

Then will the True God in turn invoke the

[paragraph continues] Unapproachable God, that is to say the One and Only One, and He will send forth a Light-power Invocation to the Unapproachable. out of Himself, into the Space of the True God, and the disciples shall be perfected in all fullness and be made into an Order in that Treasure. They shall sing hymns of praise to the Unapproachable God, for, while still in the body, they have received the Mystery of the Forgiveness of Sins, and attained to the Space of the True God.

The disciples hereupon ask to be given this Great Mystery; the Master promises that He will give it; The Mystery of the Twelve Æons. but before receiving it, they must be told the mystery of the Twelve (supernal) Æons, their seals, names, and apologies. These are given, seal-diagrams, names, numbers, and apologies; the last being in the form “Make way [mystery names], ye Rulers of the first (second, etc.) Æon, for I invoke [other mystery names—these being superior names of the Light-treasure].”

The sixth (? seventh) Æon is called the Little Midst, for it belongs to the six Æons which have believed on the Light; the Rulers of these Æons have a little good in them.

In the twelfth Æon is the Invisible God and Barbēlō and the Ingenerable God. The Invisible God is in a space alone in the twelfth Æon with veils drawn before him, and in that Æon are many other gods called the great rulers of the Æons, though servants of the Invisible God, Barbēlō and the Ingenerable God.

In the thirteenth Æon is the Great Invisible God, the Great Virginal Spirit (? Barbēlō) and the four

The Thirteenth Æon.and twenty emanations of the Invisible God. The mystery-names of these four and twenty are given, and also the invocation of the higher names of the Light-treasure in which are contained a series of triple ōmegas four times repeated, and a series of triple ētas four times repeated. The names of these emanations are said to be their names “from the beginning.”

The Fourteenth Æon.Yet higher in the fourteenth Æon is a second Great Invisible God, and another Great God called the “Great Just One” (χρηστός); he is a power of the three Light-rulers which are within all the Æons, but without the Treasure of Light. Here also are numbers of emanations. The powers of this Æon will try to detain the disciples in order that they may perform the mysteries of Jesus in those spaces, and so these powers themselves receive further powers from the powers of the Light-treasure. The disciples, however, are given the proper seals, numbers, and apologies, so that the powers shall. withdraw.

The Three Great Rulers.Now the three Great Rulers that are within all these Invisibles (i.e., the emanations of the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Æons), but without the Treasure of Light, are called the Triple-powered Gods, and are above all others.

They themselves have received the mysteries of the Treasure of Light, for when the First Power came forth (from the Light-kingdom) they first of all remained in it (the Power), and when they emerged from it the Kingdom of Light was preached to them. “I gave them,” says the Master, “the mysteries

which I have given unto you, but I have not given them the Mystery of the Forgiveness of Sins… Therefore now I say unto you that I, when I shall separate all the Æons, will give to these three Rulers of the Light, who are in the last [highest] of all the Æons, the Mystery of the Forgiveness of Sins, because they have believed in the Mystery of the Light-realm.”

No one can pass beyond them till he have received the Mystery of the Forgiveness of Sins; but, continues the Master, they are not to fear on this account, for there is no place of punishment in those spaces, for their indwellers received the Mysteries (? of Baptism).

The seals, names, and apologies of these powers are then given, and here unfortunately the text breaks suddenly off, and we come to the end of Schmidt’s Second Book of Ieou.

Taking now Schmidt’s First Book we next come to a description of the middle Light-world, and Concerning Ieou the Emanator of the Middle Light-world. its Ruler, the True God, the Demiurgos, above whom are the Treasures of the Plērōma of the Father. Jesus is still the narrator. The subject is one of immense complexity, with infinite emanations, treasures (i.e., storehouses of riches and fullness), spaces, orders, and hierarchies, with diagrams and symbols, and hosts of (to me) absolutely unintelligible “authentic” names, which are said to be “in the language of my Father.” The authentic name of the supernal Demiurgos is translated as the True God or God of Truth, and is given in Greek transliteration as

[paragraph continues] Ieou, which Schmidt transliterates into German as Jeû.

The Tetragrammaton.I would suggest that Ieou is a transliteration of the four-lettered mystery name of the creator according to Semitic and Chaldæan tradition, the tetragrammaton of the Kabalah. Theodoret tells us that the Samaritans pronounced this name Iabe (Iave) and the Jews Iaō. Since the sixteenth century, by adding the vowels of Adonai to the unpronounceable Y H V H, it has been pronounced Jehovah. It is now generally written Yahweh: but there is no certainty in the matter, beyond the fact that Jehovah is absolutely wrong. Ieou or Iao are probably attempts in Greek transliteration at the same Semitic name, which contained letters totally unrepresentable in Greek; Yahoo or Yahuwh perchance, the name hidden in Iacchus (Yach), still further corrupted into Bacchus by the Greeks. Iacchus was the mystery-name of the creative power in that great mystery tradition; Bacchus was the name in the popular cult. But to continue with our summary.

Jesus, the Living One, has apparently taken his disciples with Him through the inner spaces of the unseen world, and brought them to the plane of this True God, from which He gives the mystic instruction on the creative dispensation of the universe, in the Realm of Light.

He first shows them Ieou in his own nature, as a simple emanation from the Ineffable Treasures of the Father, before he has in his turn sent forth emanations by the command of the Father. A strange combination of letters and signs is said to be the

[paragraph continues] “name” of this God “according to the treasures which are outside this region”—that is to say, either the planes below or sub-planes of that plane.

But out of Ieou are to come a host of emanations, through the command of the Father, who are in their turn to become fathers of treasures; each of these fathers is also to be called Ieou. This ordering is effected by Jesus as the Logos; but the True God is the father of all of these fathers or fatherhoods, for he is a direct emanation from the Father, and through him and from him all subsequent emanation will proceed. Further, from each of the subordinate Ieou’s, through the command of the Father, will proceed other hosts to fill the treasures, and they shall be called Orders (or hierarchies) of the Treasures of Light. Myriads of myriads will arise out of them. We are therefore in the Light-kingdom.

We are next given a diagram which is said to be the type of the True God before he The Type of the True God Ieou. emanated, that is to say when the subsequent emanations lay potential within him. The diagram is like an egg, with a smaller egg or nucleus within it containing three lines or strokes. The upper circumferences, or shells, of both the egg and the nucleus are lacking, as though to represent the creative Light-beam from the Father streaming into them.

The Mystic Diagrams.It is very probable, therefore, that in these diagrams squares may represent treasures or the substance-side, while circles may represent gods or the energy-side—but these can interchange, for the substance of one plane or phase becomes the energy of the plane below. The three strokes seem to represent the potential triad or trinity latent in all manifestation, and this triad acting within the tetrad of the squares produces the infinite ordering into twelves or dodecads. We should also recollect that in all probability we have only a very faulty reproduction of these diagrams, for we have to take into account the translating and copying and re-copying by ignorant scribes.

The three lines are said to be the three Voices, which Ieou will send forth when he is ordered “to praise the Father,” that is to say, to emanate, for this is how the creative song of praise is sung.

Cosmic Embryology.Next we have a diagram of the first moment of this emanation; it is curious to notice that the symbols used closely resemble a spermatozoon and ovum. Within a square is a small circle with its diameter produced, so that it very well represents the head and tail of a spermatozoon; the ovum consists of three concentric circles, the innermost of which has a diameter and is of the same size as the head of the spermatozoon, which has also a similar diameter; there are thus two of the lines or strokes or Voices still latent, and only one is so far manifest.

Following this comes a diagram the upper half of which apparently repeats the preceding diagram, and

the lower half consists of six concentric circles with a point in the centre. The latter is called The Seal on the Forehead of Ieou. the seal (χαρακτήρ) upon the face or forehead of Ieou, and is said to be the type of the treasures. This emanation from the True God is caused by the streaming into the True God of a Light-power from the ineffable treasures above, in response to an invocation of Jesus as the Logos, calling upon the Name of His Father. The Light-power is called the “Little Idea,” presumably to signify that though it has power to energize all creation, it is but little compared to the real “Greatnesses” or Ideas in the Divine Mind.

What follows is beyond my power of summarizing. We have diagrams of a series of twenty-eight Ieou’s, General Characteristics of the Diagram. before the text again breaks suddenly off. What was the full number in the original is now impossible to say; Schmidt supposes thirty. The diagrams appear to have been very carelessly copied, but present certain general characteristics. The upper part generally consists of six squares, one within the other; within the smallest square is the word Ieou, and the special mystery-name of the Ieou or treasure for which the diagram stands. These names are generally placed over a small oblong figure (or two lines), which are said to stand for the “root” of the spaces or regions in which the particular Ieou is placed. Above and below, cutting through the top and bottom sides of the six squares, are two parallel lines, which are said to denote the paths whereby one must travel if he would enter into the space of the father of the treasure. These paths

where they cross the sides of the square are marked by Greek letters, alphas, which are said to stand for the curtains or veils which are drawn before the father. Above each diagram of squares we find again the three lines or strokes, which are now said to be the three Gates or Doors of each treasure. Each treasure has twelve orders, the authentic names of the Heads of each of which are appended, together with the authentic names of the three Guardians or Watchers of the Gates.

The lower half of each diagram consists of the seal upon the forehead of the Ieou; these seals are mostly circles with varying contents, but it is exceedingly difficult to trace any connection between them.

The Twelve the Order of Jesus.Between the second and third Ieou diagram is another figure differing entirely from the rest of the series: as to its meaning I have no notion. It is followed by these words of Jesus: “From these orders I will take Twelve and range them for Myself, that they may serve Me.” This probably refers to the prototypes of the souls of the disciples which Jesus chooses for Himself before their incarnation, as we learn from the Pistis Sophia.

With the twenty-eighth diagram the text breaks off suddenly; and the next subject we meet with, according to Schmidt’s ordering of the leaves, is a hymn which Jesus sings to the First Mystery.

After printing this fragment in this place, Schmidt came to the conclusion that these pages must be separated, and treated as fragments of

another work, on the ground that they could not be brought into organic unity with the rest.

We are now in the lower space or plane of the Thirteen Æons, each of which has its father or creator, its Ieou, with rulers, and subordinate powers, Hymn to the First Mystery sung in the Thirteen Æons. called decans and liturgi, signifying servants, ministers, or workmen. There are thirteen praise-givings, one for each Æon, but the text of the first four is missing. The general tenour of each petition is as follows:

“Give ear unto me, while I sing Thy praises, O Thou First Mystery, who didst shine forth in his mystery [i.e., the mystery of that particular Æon]; it was Thy Light which caused Ieou to order this Æon and establish therein its rulers, ministers, and workers. [Then follows the “imperishable name” of the Æon.] Save all my Members (Limbs), which since the foundation of the world have been scattered abroad in all the rulers, ministers, and workmen of this Æon, and gather them all together and receive them into the Light!”

The final petition is concluded by a threefold Amen.

The peculiarity of the praise-giving with regard to the Thirteenth Æon consists in the fact that The Thirteenth Æon. it is treated apparently as a separate plane or space. By command of the First Mystery the Ieou of this space brought into existence the space of the four and twenty invisible emanations, with all their rulers, gods, lords, archangels and angels, their ministers and workmen; further to this space of the Thirteenth Æon are assigned the “three gods.” Moreover, by command of

the First Mystery the six Rulers under Iabraōth, who have believed in the Light-kingdom, are set just below this Thirteenth Æon in a space of pure air, the six unrepentant Rulers being apparently assigned to the lower impure atmosphere.

With regard to the scattering of the Limbs, we may remind the reader of Epiphanius’ quotation from The Gospel of Philip: “I have recognised myself and gathered myself together from all sides. I have sown no children to the Ruler [the lord of this world], but have torn up his roots; I have gathered together my limbs that were scattered abroad, and I know thee who thou art.”

The Sixty Treasures.We are now introduced to a new subject. Jesus is taking His Order, the twelve disciples, through the Treasures of the Middle Light-world, and giving them the seals, numbers, and authentic names whereby these Treasures can be entered and passed through. There are sixty of these Treasures, but our narrative begins only in the fifty-sixth, for all the intervening pages are lost. From what we are here told I am inclined to think that there were also sixty diagrams of the Ieou’s, and not thirty only as Schmidt supposes. Fundamentally there were presumably twelve main treasures, but each apparently was regarded from five different standpoints, each view-point being called an order or ordering. There was thus a twelve-fold ordering, and a five-fold ordering as well, all immanent in the God “who dwells in the Middle of the universe,” that is to say, in Ieou, the God of the Middle Light-world. Of the five, two are

called the exterior, two the interior, and one the middle order.

Each treasure is said to be surrounded by six regions or spaces, represented by the squares of the diagrams. By a use of the seals (a series of very curious diagrams), numbers, and names, the Guardians, Orders, and Veils are said to disperse and the innermost space of the father of the treasure is reached, and so the secret of his authentic name is revealed. Moreover within each treasure is a Door or Gate, and without three Gates; each of the outer Gates has three Guardians, but the inner gate has but one, presumably the father of the treasure himself.

On the conclusion of this exposition, the disciples

ask how all these spaces and their fatherhoods The Little Idea. have come into being. Jesus replies that it is because of the “Little Idea,” which the Father has left behind and not withdrawn into Himself; all else of the Father He has withdrawn into Himself. “It was in this Little Idea that I streamed forth, having My being in the Father; I burst forth and freed Myself therefrom. I shone forth and it emanated Me, the first emanation therefrom, its perfect likeness and image. When it had emanated Me I stood before it.” This was the First Voice.

Again it shone forth and emanated, sending forth the Second Voice—all these spaces, which came forth one after another.

The Third Voice streamed forth and emanated the rulers of all these spaces.

It is He, Jesus, the First Voice, the first emanation,

who has gathered together His own Order—the Twelve, and taken them through all the spaces, that they may serve Him, He has given them the powers whereby they may pass through all these spaces within, to the innermost space of the ruler of them all, the True God.

The Name of the Great Power.The disciples then remind Jesus that He had promised to give them the one master-name, whereby every space could be traversed without the wearisome repetition of each of the separate names—the Name that was the key to unlock every gate in every treasure. Is this, they ask, the Great Name of the Father?

The Christ (the first mention of this title) replied: “Nay, but the Name of the Great Power that is in all the spaces.”

He then gives them this authentic name—apparently a sentence in cypher, interspersed with the triple repetition of the seven vowels. It is to be said in the Space of the True God, in the “space of the interiors which belongs to the space of the exteriors.” The name must be invoked, turning to the four corners of the treasure, and then followed by the request that all the paths to the fatherhood be left free to the disciple, “for I have invoked the Great Name of the God of all the spaces.” Then will all the veils be withdrawn, and all the rulers disperse; they will withdraw “into their own form.

“Lo, now,” continued the Master, “I have told you the [master-name]; guard it, and do not repeat it continually, so that all the spaces may not be disquieted because of the glory therein.”

Hereupon Jesus commands His disciples to follow Him, and goes yet farther within, into the seventh Hymn to the Unapproachable God Sung in the seventh Treasure. treasure; this cannot apparently be the seventh treasure of the sixty, but must be some other ordering. Here He commands them to surround Him, and answer Him with a threefold Amen for every praise-giving, as He sings a hymn of praise to the Father because of the emanation of the treasures.

The Father is addressed first by the Ineffable Name, symbols of which are given; then as “God, My Father,” and then as the “Unapproachable One.” The form of each praise-giving begins with the words: “I praise Thee, Thou Unapproachable God, for that Thou didst shine forth in Thyself,” and ends with the question: “For what now is Thy will, but that all this should be, O Unapproachable God?”

The subject of the hymn is that God has withdrawn Himself into Himself, into His Truth, save only one Little Idea, the space of which He has left as the shining Light-world, shining within the Father. It is a radiance of the Father within Himself, according to His will. This Light is Jesus, the one emanation of the Father through His will. Jesus is the perfect likeness and whole image of God. The second emanation brings into being the spaces which surround the Father. The third emanation is the bringing into being the powers and rulers of the Light-spaces, which are called Treasures. Moreover all these powers are energized by a Great Power emanated by the Father, so that they are called True Gods, that is, Gods in Truth (presumably as distinguished

from the Gods of the vulgar pantheons). It is this Power that energizes not only in the various fathers of the treasures, but also in the subordinate powers.

Thus also are emanated the Guardians or Watchers and the sixty fatherhoods, one for each treasure. These sixty are called the “Orders of the Five Trees.” It is also this Power which has brought into existence the seals and the great name. This same Power is further called the [First?] Mystery and the Light-image surrounding the Father.

The Great Logoi according to the Mystery.These Light-spaces are called the Spaces of the “Great Logoi according to the Mystery,” in whom is the glory of the Father. This leads us to suppose that the “Great Logos” of the title of the treatise is the same as the First Mystery, the Great Power, and therefore identical with Jesus. The Great Logoi are also called Ieou’s. The hymn then continues:

“I praise Thee, O Unapproachable God, for that Thou didst shine forth in Thyself; Thou hast emanated Thy One and Only Mystery, Thou who art an unapproachable God even for these Logoi. Thou art an unapproachable among them, in this Great Logos according to the Mystery of Ieou, the father of all Ieou’s, which is Thyself;—yet what is else Thy one and only will but that we should draw nigh Thee in them, O God that none can approach, to whom nevertheless we have drawn near in this Great Logos according to the Mystery of Ieou?”

I am inclined to think that “Logos” is here used in two meanings. It generally means Reason or

[paragraph continues] Word; here it seems to mean also Sermon, Discourse, or Teaching.

The hymn ends with praises in which the Father is again said to have withdrawn, or inbreathed, Himself The Universal Idea. entirely into His Universal Likeness and Idea, with the single exception of the Little Idea, leaving it as a means whereby His boundless Riches, universal Glory, and mighty Mysteries might be manifested. The Great or Universal Idea and the Little Idea are thus seen to correspond in the ideal spiritual world to the ideas of the macrocosm and microcosm. And so ends this remarkable hymn, with a final triple Amen.

The two remaining fragments are put by Schmidt in an appendix. The first fragment is part of a hymn of praise, each praise-giving of which begins with the words:

“Give ear unto me, while I sing Thy praises, Thou Mystery before all Uncontainables and Impassables, Hymn to the [? First] Mystery. who didst shine forth in Thy Mystery, in order that he Mystery that is from the beginning should be completed.”

The contents of the hymn are as follows, the imperishable names being added after each technical term:

The Mystery shining forth became Water of the Ocean. The Earth in the midst of the Ocean became purified. The whole vast matter of the Ocean became purified—that is to say, the Sea and all species existing therein. Through its shining forth it sealed the Sea and all that are therein, for the power that is in them was in disorder (? chaos) against the existing order (? cosmos).

The Way of the Midst.The hymn here breaks off suddenly, and we have a description of the passing of the soul through the regions of the dæmonian powers, and of the imperishable names of the “mystery of their fear,” whereby the soul can escape from their clutches. These are the spaces of the orders of the various great ministers of the Great Powerful Ruler in the Way of the Midst; and the names of these ministers, recoverable from this scrap, are the same as the Rulers of the Way of the Midst as given in the Extracts from the Books of the Saviour. This Great Powerful Ruler is further described as “he who is filled with wrath.” He is the successor of the Ruler of the Outer Darkness, of that space which changes all forms. He is spread out on the Way of the Midst, so that he may carry off the souls like a robber.

The leaves on which these fragments are found differ from the rest of the MS. in that they are surrounded by single-lined borders.

SELECTIONS FROM THE UNTITLED APOCALYPSE OF THE CODEX BRUCIANUS.

THE beginning is lost, and the leaves that are left us plunge into the midst of a description of the supernal beings and spaces as follows:

“He [the God beyond Being] established Him, that they might strive towards the City in which is their The First Being. Image. In this City it is that they move and live; it is the House of the Father, and the Vesture of the Son, and the Power of the Mother, and the Image of the Fullness (Plērōma). He is the First Father of the All; He is the first Being; He is the King of the Intangibles. It is He in whom the All moves. It is He in whom He gave it (the All) Form. This is the self-produced and self-generated Space; this is the Depth of the All. He is the Great One whose real being is deeper than the Depth. He it is to whom the All did come. The All was silent before Him and spake not to Him, for unspeakable and incomprehensible is He. He is the first Source; He it is whose Voice hath gone forth into all spaces. He is the first Tone, whereby the All doth sense and comprehend. He it is whose Limbs (Members) make a myriad of myriads of Powers, each one of which comes from them.

“The second space came into being, which is The Second Being to be called Demiurge, and Father, and Logos, and Source, and Mind, and Man, and Eternal, and Limitless. This is the Pillar (or Support); He is the Overseer. He, too, is Father

of the All; He it is upon whose Head the Æons form a wreath, shooting forth their rays. The Outline of His Face is beyond all possibility of knowing in the outer Worlds—those Worlds which ever seek His Face, desiring to know it, for His Word has gone forth into them, and they long to see Him. The Light of his Eyes penetrates the Spaces of the Outer Plērōma, and the Word which comes forth from his Mouth penetrates the Above and Below [of the Outer Worlds]. The Hair of His Head is the number of the Hidden Worlds, and the Outline of his Face is the type of the Æons. The Hairs of his Face are the number of the Outer Worlds, and the out-spreading of his Hands is the manifestation of the Cross; the out-spreading of the Cross is the ninefold, on the Right and the Left.

The Supernal Cross.”The source of the Cross is the Man whom no man can comprehend. He is the Father; He is the Source from which the Silence wells; He it is who is desired in every Space. He is the Father from whom came forth the Monad like a light-spark, in comparison with which (Monad) all Worlds are as [? darkness]; for it is the Monad which has moved all things in their out-shining. And they have received Gnosis, and Life, and Hope, and Peace, and Love, and Resurrection, and Faith, and Rebirth, and the Seal. These are the ninefold which have come from the Father of those who are without beginning, The Twelve Depths.from Him who is Father and Mother to Himself alone, whose Plērōma surrounds [that is transcends] the Twelve Depths.

“1. The first Depth is the All-source from which all Sources have come.

“2. The second Depth is the All-wise One from which all Wise ones have come.

“3. The third Depth is the All-mystery from which all Mysteries have come.

“4. The fourth Depth is the All-gnosis from which all Gnosis hath come.

“5. The fifth Depth is the All-holy from which all Holiness hath come.

“6. The sixth Depth is the Silence from which all Silence hath come.

“7. The seventh Depth is the Gate which hath no substance, from which all Substances have come.

“8. The eighth Depth is the Forefather from whom all Forefathers have come.

“9. The ninth Depth is the All-father-Self-father, in which all Fathers exist,—He being the only father they have.

“10. The tenth Depth is the All-power from which all Powers have come.

“11. The eleventh Depth is that in which is the First Invisible, from which all Invisibles have come.

“12. The twelfth Depth is the Truth from which all Truth hath come.

“This [the second space, as a Monad, which surrounds the Depths], is the Truth which embraces The Primal Source. them all; this is the Image of the Father; this is the Truth of the All; this is the Mother of all [their] Æons; this it is which surrounds all Depths. This is the Monad which is incomprehensible or unknowable; this it is which has

no Seal (or Mark), in which are all Seals; which is blessed for ever and ever. This is the eternal Father; this the ineffable, unthinkable, incomprehensible, untranscendible Father; this it is in which the All became joyous; it rejoiced and was joyful, and brought forth in its joy myriads of myriads of Æons; they were called the ‘Births of Joy,’ because it (the All) had joyed with the Father. These are the Worlds from which the Cross up-sprang; out of these incorporeal Members did the Man arise.

The Unmanifested.”This is the Father and the Source of All, whose Members are gathered together and completed. All Names have come from the Father—whether such Names as Ineffable, or Unknowable, or Incomprehensible, or Invisible, or Single, or Solitary, or Power, or All-power, or whether all those Names which are named in silence alone—all of them come from the Father, whom all the outer Worlds behold as the stars of the firmament in the night. As men desire to see the sun, so do the outer Worlds desire to see the Father, because of his invisibility which is round about Him. For ever to the Æons doth He give Life, and through His Word hath the Indivisible [? Atom] learnt to know the Monad; and by His Word hath the holy Plērōma come into being.

The Manifested, the Plērōma.”This is the Father, the second Demiurge; through the Breath of His Mouth Forethought made the that-which-is-not. The that-which-is-not arose through the will of Him, for He it is who commands the All to come into being. In this

wise hath He made the holy Plērōma: four Gates, and in it (the Plērōma) are four Monads, a Monad for each Gate, and six Supporters for each Gate, making four and twenty Supporters, and four and twenty myriads of Powers for each Gate; and nine Ennads for every Gate, and ten Decads for every Gate, and twelve Dodecads for every Gate, and five Pentads of Powers for every Gate, and an Overseer who hath three faces—an ingenerable, a true, and an ineffable face, for every Gate.

“One of his faces looks without the Gate to the outer Æons, and the other looks on Setheus, and the Three-faced and Two-faced Space. third looks upwards—to the Sonship in each Monad [i.e., the one Sonship contained in the four Monads], where [i.e., above] is Aphrēdōn with his twelve Righteous Ones. ‘There [above] is the Forefather; in that space is Adam [the Man] who belongs to the Light, and his three hundred and sixty-five Æons, and there is the Perfect Mind, [all three] surrounding a Basket [? network, representing a conical swirl of forces or atoms] that knows no death.

“The ineffable face of the Overseer looks within to the Holy of Holies—that is, to the Boundless one, he being the head of the Holy Place (Shrine). He has two faces; one opens to the space of the Depth and the other opens to the space of the Overseer who is called the ‘Child.’ And there is there [within] a Depth which is called the ‘Light’ or the ‘Shining One,’ in which is hidden an Alone-born (μονογενής), who manifests three Powers and is mighty in all Powers.

“He [the Alone-born] is the Indivisible; He it is who is never divided; it is for Him that the All has opened [? divided] itself, for to Him belong all the Powers.”

The above passages, taken in order from the first pages, according to Schmidt’s arrangement of the leaves, will give the reader some idea of the nature of the unabridged contents of this apocalyptic treatise. For the rest we must content ourselves with a translation of some of the, more intelligible or striking passages.

The View of the Commentator.The original seer seems to have endeavoured to describe his vision of the inner spaces from different points of view, or rather to have seen the same mystery from various points of view, or aspects, in a series of visions. Interspersed we find the comments of another writer. The first indubitably clear instance of this is a passage of which unfortunately sad havoc has been made by the Coptic translator. The commentator tells us that the subject is very difficult, nay that it is utterly impossible to describe those things with the “tongue of flesh”; nevertheless he does not think that any one could succeed any better than has the original seer, or those who spoke or wrote through him. These spaces and beings are more excellent than the intellectual powers in man, and therefore it is impossible for any one to understand them, unless he have the good fortune to meet with a “kinsman” of those higher ones—that is to say, a “relative of the mystery”—one who has learned the mystery, that is to say, has experienced these states of consciousness;

and even then the Mystery of the Father cannot be expressed in its reality, as has been stated Marsanēs, Nicotheus, and Phosilampēs. by even such advanced seers as Marsanēs and  Nicotheus, former seers of the Gnosis; all the Perfect have seen Him, and have sung His praises each as best he could, but they have all failed to reveal Him. And a little later, in commenting on the “Metropolis of the Alone-begotten,” the same writer quotes from another Master of the Gnosis, who, when he had understood, said: “Through Him is That-which-really-is and That-which-really-is-not, through which the Hidden-which-really-is and the Manifest-which-really-is-not exists.” The Gnostic from whom this sentence is quoted is called Phōsilampēs; but the ideas are so identical with those of Basilides, that I cannot but think Phōsilampēs is merely some cryptonym of the school for this teacher.

The Logos and His creative powers and self-emanation is the subject of much of our treatise. To take one instance out of many:

“This is Setheus, who dwells in the Shrine as a King and God. He is the Logos-Creator; it is He The Creative Logos. who commandeth the All to work. He is the Creative Mind according to the command of God, the Father; whom the creature adores as God, and as Lord, and as Saviour, and is subject to Him; at whom all things stand in wonder because of His grace and beauty; for whose head the inner universe forms a crown, and the outer is set under His feet, while the middle universe surroundeth Him, praising Him and saying:

“‘Holy, holy, holy is He, the [here follow the seven vowels each three times repeated]; that is to say: Thou art the Living One among the living; Thou art the Holy One among the holy; Thou art Being among beings; Thou art Father among the fathers; Thou art God among the gods; Thou art Lord among the lords; Thou art Space among the spaces.’

Thus too do they praise Him: ‘Thou art the House and Thou art the Dweller in the House.’ And yet again do they praise and address the Son hidden in Him: ‘Thou art, Thou art the Alone-begotten, Light, Life, and Grace.’”

We are told of the descent of the Light-spark or Light-stream from on high, and how it finally reaches matter.

“Then the Veils were opened and Light penetrated The Descent of the Light-spark. to Matter below, and to those which possessed no form and no likeness; and thus have they gained for themselves the likeness of the Light. Some indeed rejoiced that the Light had come to them, and that they had become rich; others wept, because they had become poor, and what was theirs had been taken away from them. Thus came Grace in that which had come forth. And captivity was taken captive and praised the Æons who had received the Spark in themselves. And Guardians were sent them …; they gave help to those who had believed in the Light-spark.”

“And this [the Light-spark] is the Indivisible, The Spiritual Atom. which led the struggle for the universe; and all things were bestowed upon him, through Him who is exalted above all things; and the immeasurable

[paragraph continues] Depth was bestowed upon him, together with the countless fatherhoods that are therein.”

In the field of its being is the God-bearing or God-generating Land. And the powers of him who is crowned with this Light-wreath, sing praises to the King, the Alone-begotten, the Logos, saying:

“Through Thee have we won fame, and through Thee have we seen the Father of all, and the MotherHymn to the Logos. of all things hidden in all spaces, the Conceiver of all æons. She is the Conceiver of all gods and all lords; she is the Gnosis of all invisibles. Thy Image is the mother of all Uncontainables and the power of all Impassables… . Through Thy Image we saw Thee, fled to Thee, stood in Thee, and received the unfading wreath, which has been known through Thee. Praise to Thee, for ever and ever, O Thou Alone-begotten One. Amen!”

Of such a one we learn: “He became a body of light and penetrated into the æons of the Indivisible, The Christ. until he reached the Alone-begotten, who is in the Monad [the Father] who dwells in silence alone. And they [his powers] received the Grace of the Alone-begotten, that is to say His goodness, and he received the eternal wreath. He [the Logos] is the Father of all the Light-sparks; His is the chief of all immortal bodies; this is He for whose sake resurrection is granted to these [immortal] bodies.”

Higher and higher grades of being are described, and we hear of the Perfected One “who has received the Grace of the Unknowable, and thereby such a Son-ship as the Plērōma could not endure, because

of the superfluity of its light and the brilliancy which was in Him.”

The Glorified of the Logos.Still higher soars the intuition of the Gnostic seer, and we read further of the Logos-Demiurgos, “with whom is a host of powers having wreaths (or crowns) on their heads. Their crowns send forth rays; the brilliancy of their bodies is as the life of the space into which they are come; the word (logos) that comes out of their mouth is eternal life, and. the light that comes forth from their eyes is rest for them; the movement of their hands is their flight to the space out of which they are come, and their gazing on their own faces is knowledge of themselves; the going to themselves is a repeated return, and the stretching out of their hands establishes them; the hearing of their ears is the perception in their heart, and the union of their limbs is the in-gathering of the dispersion of Israel; their holding to one another is their fortification in the Logos… .

the At-onement.”And the whole at-onement was accomplished of the Creator-Logos with those who had come forth from the re-ordering which had been brought to pass. And they became all One, as it is written: “They became all One in the One and Only One.’

“Then the Logos-Creator became Divine Power, and Lord, and Saviour, and Christ [or Righteous—χρηστὸς frequently occurring throughout the MS. for χρηστός], and Good, and Father, and Mother. He it is whose labour has succeeded; He was honoured and became the Father of them who believed. He became the Lord and the Mighty One.”

In this consummation, all things are ordered anew for the Victor. “To Him is given the first fruits of Soteriology.the sacrifice of the Sonship, whereby He is given power to become thrice-powerful. And He received the vow of the Sonship, because the universe has been sold [? into slavery]; and He received the struggle [task] which was entrusted to Him. He raised up the whole purity of matter and made it into a World, an Æon, and a City, which is called ‘Immortality’ and ‘Jerusalem.’ And it is also called the ‘New Earth,’ and ‘Self-sufficing,’ and ‘Perfect Freedom.’ That Land is a god-bearing and a quickening land.”

The Wreath and Robe of the glorified is sung of. “This is the Wreath of which it is written: ‘It was given to Solomon on the day of the joy of his heart.’

“The first Monad has sent Him an ineffable Vesture, which is all Light, and all Life, and all The Ineffable Vesture.Resurrection, and all Love, and all Hope, and all Faith, all Wisdom, and all Gnosis, and all Truth, and all Peace… . And in it is the universe, and the universe has found itself in it, and known itself therein. And it gave them all light in its ineffable Light, myriads of myriads of powers were given it, in order that it should raise up the universe once for all.

“It [? the Monad] gathered its ventures to itself, and made them after the fashion of a veil, which surrounds it on all sides, and poured itself over them, and raised up all, and separated them all according to orders and laws and forethought.

“And that-which-is separated itself from that-which-is-not,

The Purification of the Lower Nature.and that-which-is-not is the evil which has manifested itself in matter. And the Vesture-power separated that-which-is from that-which-is-not, and called that-which-is ‘eternal’ (æonian), and that-which-is-not ‘matter’; and it divided in the midst that-which-is from that-which-is-not, and laid between them veils and purifying powers in order that they might cleanse and purge them.”

World-Saviour.The future work of the Glorified is further described: “And myriads of myriads of glories and angels and archangels and ministers were given Him to serve Him—those of matter. And authority over all things was given Him, and He created for Himself a mighty Æon, and in it laid a vast Plērōma, and in it a mighty Sanctuary, and all the powers He had received He placed in them. And He rejoiced in them, as He brought forth His creatures once again, according to the commandment of the Father who is hidden in silence, who sent Him these treasures. And the crown of Fatherhood was given Him, for He (the Father) has established Him as father of those who arose after Him [namely, His disciples, the disciples of the Master].

“And He cried out and said: ‘My children, with whom I travail until the Christ is formed in you’; and again He cries: ‘Yea, I would set beside a holy virgin an only husband Christ.’

“So when He had seen the Grace with which the hidden Father had endowed Him, He himself desired to lead back the universe to the hidden Father, for

[paragraph continues] His [the Father’s] will is this, that the universe should return to Him.

“And they [those who repented] fled before the matter of the [lower] æon, abandoning it, and soared The Promise. upward to the Æon of Him who is father to Himself alone, and took the vow on themselves which was vowed for them by Him who says: ‘He who hath forsaken father and mother, brother and sister, wife and child, and possessions, and will take up his cross and follow Me, he will receive the promises which I have vowed to him; and I will give such the mystery of the hidden Father, for they have loved what is His and have fled from him who has pursued them with force.’

“So he gave them Glory, Joy, Jubilation, Gladness, Peace, Hope, Faith, Love, and Truth imperishable. This is the ninefold which is given unto them who have fled from matter. And they have become blessed and perfect, and have recognized the True God, and known the mystery which is given to the Man, for which cause He hath revealed Himself until they saw Him, for He [the True God] is in truth invisible; for their sakes hath He revealed in words His Logos, so that they might know Him and become gods and perfect.”

Still speaking of the First-born and His glories, the cosmic powers of His spiritual vesture are again described:

“They gave Him a Vesture to consummate everything in Him. And in it are all bodies: the body of The Powers of the Light-vesture. fire, the body of water, the body of ether, the body of earth, the body of air, the body of

the angels, the body of the archangels, the body of the powers, the body of the mighty ones, the body of the gods, and the body of the lords; in one word, in it are all bodies, so that none may prevent Him from going upwards and downwards to the under-world.

“He is the First-born to whom the Inner and the Outer have promised everything He may desire. He it is who hath separated all matter; and as He hath poured Himself over it, ‘like a hen which spreadeth her wings over her chickens,’ so hath the First-born prepared matter and raised up myriads and myriads of species and kinds. And when the matter had grown warm, it set free the multitude of powers which are His; and they sprang up like herbs, and were separated according to kinds and species. And He gave them the law—to love one another, and to honour God, and praise Him, and seek for Him, who He is, and what He is, and to wonder at the place whence they have come out, for it is narrow and difficult, and not to return thither again, but to follow Him who hath given them the law.

The Mothers of Men.”And He raised them out of the darkness of matter, which is their mother, and told them what Light is, for they had not yet known of the Light, whether it existed or not. Then He gave them the commandment never to injure one another, and went from them to the Mother of the universe, beside the Father, that they might [in turn] give laws to those who have come out of matter.”

And the powers of the Mother sing a hymn to the Son, praising the One and Only One, and saying

“Thou alone art the Boundless; Thou alone the Depth; Thou alone the Unknowable; Thou art He The Song of Praise of the Mother Above. for whom all seek, and yet [unaided] find Thee not, for no one can know Thee against Thy will, and no one can praise Thee against Thy will. Thy will alone is it which became space for Thee, for no one can contain Thee, for Thou art the space of all. I pray Thee give orderings to those of the world, and regulations to my offspring according to Thy will. And grieve not my offspring, for no one is ever grieved by Thee; yet no one hath ever known Thy counsel. Thou art He of whom they all, both inner and outer, stand in need, for Thou alone art uncontainable, and Thou alone art beyond all vision, and Thou alone art beyond all substance; Thou who alone hast given seals [distinguishing marks or characteristics] to all creatures, and manifested them in Thyself.

“Thou too art Creator of those which have not yet manifested themselves. Thou alone knowest The Hidden Worlds. these; we know them not. Thou alone indicatest them to us, that we [the powers] may pray Thee for her [the Mother Sophia’s] sake to manifest them to us, for we can know them through Thee alone. Thou alone hast exalted Thyself to the host of hidden worlds, that they might know Thee; it is Thou who hast given them to know Thee, that Thou hast brought them to birth in Thy incorporeal body, and Thou hast taught them

that Thou hast begotten the Man in Thy self-born Mind, and in Thy Reflection and Conception.

“He is the Man begotten of Mind, to whom The Man. Reflection gave form. Thou hast given all things to the Man. He weareth them like these garments, and putteth them on like these vestures, and wrappeth Himself with the creation as with a mantle. This is the Man whom the universe prays to learn to know. Thou alone hast commanded the Man that he should manifest himself, that Thou shouldst be known through him, that Thou hast begotten him. Thou hast manifested Thyself according to Thy will. Thou art He to whom I pray, Thou Father of all fatherhood, God of all gods, Lord of lords—the ‘I’ who implores Him that He may order my forms and offspring, that I may prepare joy for them in Thy name and in Thy power.”

[The hymnody becomes confused as the mystic identifies himself with the Sophia.]

“Thou One and Only King, Thou who changest not, give me a power, and I will cause my offspring to know Thee, that Thou art their Saviour.”

The infinite Light-spark descends on the Sophia; the world-ordering is consummated in the world-drama; the purification of the inner nature achieved in the individual soul.

The Lord of Splendour.”And the Lord of Splendour descended and separated the matter and divided it into two parts and into two regions; and He gave boundaries to each region, regions that come from one father and one mother. And they who had fled to Him adored

[paragraph continues] Him; He gave them the place on His right, and bestowed on them eternal life and deathlessness. And He called the right the ‘Place of Life,’ and the left the ‘Place of Death’; the right the ‘Place of Light’ and the left the ‘Place of Darkness’; the right the ‘Place of Rest’ and the left the ‘Place of Suffering.’ And He drew boundaries and veils between them, so that they should not perceive each other, and placed watchers at the veils. And He gave to them who worshipped Him many honours, and exalted them above those who resisted and opposed Him. And He extended the space on the right into countless spaces, and made them into many orders, many æons, many worlds, many heavens, many firmaments, many regions, many places, many spaces; and He established laws for them and gave them regulations. ‘Be steadfast in My word and I will give you eternal life, and send you powers; and I will strengthen you in spirits His Promise to them who Believe. of power, and give you authority according to your will. And no one shall hinder you in what ye desire; and ye will beget for yourselves æons, worlds, and heavens, in order that the mind-born spirits may come and dwell therein. And ye will be gods, and will know that ye come from God, and will see Him that He is God in you, and He will dwell in your æon.’

“These words said the Lord of the universe to them, and disappeared from them, and hid Himself from them.

“And the births of matter rejoiced that they had been remembered, and were glad that they had come

out of the narrow and difficult place, and prayed to the hidden Mystery:

The Prayer of the Earth-born.”’Give us authority that we may create for ourselves æons and worlds, according to Thy word, upon which Thou didst agree with Thy servant; for Thou alone art the changeless one, Thou alone the boundless, the uncontainable, self-thought, self-born, self-father; Thou alone art the unshakeable and unknowable; Thou alone art silence, and love, and source of all; Thou alone art virgin of matter, spotless; whose race no man can tell, whose manifestation no man can comprehend.

“‘Hear me, in Booth, Father imperishable, Father immortal, God of the hidden worlds, Thou only Light and Life; Thou the only invisible, ineffable, unstainable, invincible; Thou alone prior to all existence! Hear our prayer, with which we pray Him who is hid in all places; Hear us and send us spirits incorporeal, that they may dwell with us and teach us of those things that Thou hast promised us; that they abide in us and we may be bodies for them. For Thy will is this, that this may be; may it be! Give law to our work and establish it, according to Thy will and according to the statute of the hidden æons, and regulate us of Thyself, for we are Thine!’”

The Powers of Discrimination are Given Them.In answer to this prayer it is described how that the mysteries (sci., of baptism and the rest) were given to those who repented; these mysteries being in grades of purification, whereby the man rises to higher grades of consciousness, by the purity of his inner vehicles, which correspond with certain states or regions.

“And He hearkened to them and sent out separating powers, which know the statute of the hidden æons. He sent them out according to the command of the hidden ones, and established orderings, according to the ordering of the height and according to the hidden statute. They began from below upwards, so that the building might be duly erected in all its courses.

“He created the air-world as a resting-place for those who had come forth [from matter], so that they The Ladder of Purification. might abide there until the establishing of those beneath them; thereafter the true dwelling-place [?]; within this the place of repentance; within this the ætherial reflections [? of the mansions of the Inheritance]; within these the self-born reflections. At that place they baptize themselves in the Name of the Self-born, who is God over them; and powers are established there beside the spring of the Water of Life… .

“Within these is the Pistis Sophia and the preexisting and ætherial Jesus with his twelve æons.”

The names of the powers in the last two spaces are given, but unfortunately a lacuna follows in the MS., and the following leaves are damaged in numerous places. Still higher and higher spaces are described as the purified souls mount the Great Ladder.

The Heavenly Man, and the Lord of the Plērōma, is sung of: “The Father has sealed Him as His Son The Son of God. in their interior, in order that they should learn to know Him in their interior. And the Name moved them in their interior, so that they saw the Invisible Unknowable. And they praised the One and Only

[paragraph continues] One, and Conception, and the Mind-born Logos, praising the three, who are one, for through Him they became supersubstantial. And the Father took their whole likeness and made it into a City or into a Man; He limned the universe in His likeness—that is to say, all these powers. Each one of them knew Him in this City; all began to sing myriads of songs of praise of the Man or the City of the Father of the universe. And the Father has taken his glory and made it into a Vesture without for the Man… . He created his body in the type of the holy Plērōma.”

Hereupon follows the whole configuration of the Limbs of the Heavenly Man. The rest of the MS. is taken up with a Hymn to the Light quoted from some other Gnostic hymn-maker, introduced by the words “he says,” and runs as follows:

Hymn to the Light.”I praise Thee, O Father of all fathers of the Light; I praise Thee, O boundless Light more excellent than all the boundless ones; I praise Thee, O uncontainable Light surpassing all uncontainables; I praise Thee, O ineffable Light, before all ineffables.”

And so on through an infinity of praise-givings, frequently of great beauty, until the MS. breaks off suddenly in the middle of a sentence.

NOTES ON THE CONTENTS OF THE BRUCE AND ASKEW CODICES.

THE attentive reader will have already perceived that the contents of the Pistis Sophia treatise, of the The Kinship of the Titled Treatises. Extracts from The Books of the Saviour, and of the fragments given under the title The Book of the Great Logos according to the Mystery, are closely related together; they indubitably belong to the same school. The result of the researches of Schmidt into this very interesting question may be most clearly seen in his reply to Preuschen’s criticism on his work, a copy of which was kindly sent me by Schmidt himself. (See Zeitschrift für wissenschaftliche Theologie, Pt. iv., 1894.) Schmidt here sums up his position, bringing together the results of his researches.

If I might myself venture a general opinion on so difficult and abstruse a subject, I would say that all the three compilations we are considering, belong not only to the same school, but also to one and the same effort at syntheticizing and reformulation. It is evident that each of them contains older materials, and it is almost certain that the writer of the Pistis Sophia was acquainted with the material of the Extracts of the Ieou and Baptism expositions. The far more difficult question is the relationship of the Extracts to The Book of the Great Logos, and the most difficult question of all is the school and authors to which to assign them.

Date.So far there is nothing absolutely proved as to date, except that the compilers of these documents had access to the same Sayings-material as the compilers of the Canonical Gospels; the terminus a quo may, therefore, be placed somewhere about the end of the first quarter of the second century. But the curious phrase used in introducing a quotation from the Pauline Letters (“Thou didst say unto us aforetime by the mouth of Paul our brother”) shows such complete indifference to the Canonical Acts account, that it argues an early date. Because of the complex nature of the contents, however, they have been ascribed by some to the third century; but this does not seem to me to be sufficient reason for so late a date, when we consider the complex nature of the new-found pre-Irenæic Gnostic work, and the exceedingly abstruse character of the contents of the superior untitled MS. of the Codex Brucianus, the contents of which Schmidt places well in the second century.

Authorship.Some of the materials are undoubtedly very old indeed, but it is the compilation-problem that at present engages us. I think that all three were compiled by the same group, or even by the same writer (though the latter will seem a very rash hypothesis to some). It is evident that the treatises pertain to the most intimate centre of Gnosticism, familiar with the inmost traditions, the most secret documents, and the practical inner experiences of the school. It matters not whether you call this stream of the Gnosis, “Ophite,” “Barbēlō-Gnostic,” “Gnostic,” or “Valentinian”; such names

could have meant little for the compiler or compilers of these documents.

Now it is evident that the Extracts and part of The Book of the Great Logos are both based on the same original. It is true that the text of the Baptism extract of the Askew Codex differs, slightly from the text of the same rite in the Bruce Codex, but they are probably translated by different hands, and both translators used great freedom in their version, and were often puzzled how to put the Greek into Coptic, as is evident in many passages.

A certain reformulation of the Gnosis is, then, referred to as The Books of the Saviour orThe Titles. The Book of the Great Logos; perhaps the original Greek document or documents had no title, and it was the copiers, or the Coptic translators and scribes, who added these titles. The Pistis Sophia treatise, however, refers to a work called The Two Books of Ieou, and further adds that they were given by the Saviour to Enoch and preserved from the Flood.

Now it seems to me that if these references in the Pistis are not interpolations, The Two Books of Ieou The Books of Ieou. cannot be identical with the common document in the Extracts and The Book of the Great Logos, but that this document was an overworking and reformulation of these two Books. The Books of Ieou belonged presumably to some ancient tradition, probably Egyptian, containing a host of symbols and seals, pass-words and mystery-names, and much else which were referred to what Manetho calls “the Egypt before

the Flood” (the Egypt of the “First Hermes” or Agathodæmon), the traditions of which were equated with the Semitic traditions by Jewish and Christian Gnostic circles. I have dealt with this subject at length in my work on the Trismegistic literature.

The Probable Author.I believe, then, that the common document in the Extracts and The Book of the Great Logos was not the actual Books of Ieou referred to in the Pistis Sophia, but that it contained the substance of the Ieou Books, worked up by a Gnostic writer into a new form. I further suggest that this writer was the same as the author of the Pistis Sophia treatise, who reformulated the Books of Ieou in the light of the Gnosis of the Living Master. These things, however, do not seem to have been done in order; they were more probably the various attempts at some consistent synthesis of the old wisdom, attempts which in all probability did not satisfy the writer. They were presumably the results of a long life of labour, and may have been several times revised or recast. Who can say in our present ignorance of all historical data?

And if it be asked: Who could have made such The Obscurity of the Subject.an attempt? I can find no answer, on reviewing the whole list of known Gnostic writers, than that Valentinus alone could in any way have attempted it. But that this can ever be proved beyond cavil I have no hope, for we know practically nothing of him and his writings; we only know of his great reputation, and of his attempted reformulation of the Gnosis. Indeed so-called Valentinianism helps us not at all in this speculation;

on the contrary, if we are to believe in any way the indications of the Church Fathers, “they of Valentinus” seem to have formulated things somewhat differently, and their ideas form only a small worked-in part of the great syntheses with which we have been dealing. But the information of the Church Fathers is very defective, and they seem for the most part to have dealt with the semi-popular phase of Gnosticism. Such abstruse subjects and such inner teachings as our Codices contain, could not possibly have been circulated publicly; they were meant for “disciples.” It is true that the Pistis is in parts in a far more popular form, but if it had been widely circulated; it is strange that no mention of so marvellous an exposition should remain.

I, however, put forward this speculation with all hesitation; it means a totally different reading of Valentinianism, a reading from within and not from without. Our ideas on Gnosticism have, however, been so often of late revised by new discoveries, that it may still be hoped that some new find may yet throw a clear light on this (at present) entirely obscure problem.

In the Introduction to my translation of the Pistis Sophia, I find that I have stated my conclusions somewhat more crudely than I should now do. I will, therefore, in repeating what I there said as to the probable story of the adventures of the contents of the Askew Codex, slightly modify some expressions.

The original Greek treatise which is now called the Pistis Sophia may, then, probably

The Original Pistis Sophia.have been compiled by Valentinus in the latter half of the second century, perhaps at Alexandria. By “compiled” I mean that this Apocalypse or Gospel, or whatever its title may have been, was not invented from first to last by Valentinus; the framework of the narrative, the selection of texts and ideas from other scriptures, Hebrew, Christian, Egyptian, Chaldæan, Greek, etc., and the adaptation of the nomenclature, were his share of the task.

The Coptic Translation.Of this original doubtless several copies were made, and mistakes may have crept in. One of these copies was presumably carried up the Nile and translated into the vernacular, Greek being but little understood so far up the river. The translator was evidently not a very accurate person; moreover his knowledge of the subject was so imperfect that he had to leave many of the technical terms in the original, and doubtless made guesses at others. It is also probable that some things were added and others subtracted on the score of orthodoxy. The wearisome length of the Psalms, for instance, which Pistis Sophia recites in her repentances, followed by the shorter Salomonic Odes, leads one to suppose that the compiler originally quoted only a few striking verses from each psalm, and that the later and more orthodox translator, with that love of wearisome repetition so characteristic of monkish piety, whether of the East or the West, added the other less apposite verses, with which he was very familiar, while he was compelled to leave the Salomonic Odes as they

stood, owing to his lack of acquaintance with the originals.

Moreover, the translator must have translated or possessed a translation of other similar documents, The Books of the Saviour. which he or a later scribe styles The Books of the Saviour, and from them he extracted what he considered to be passages apposite to the subject in hand, and appended them to the Pistis translation. These Books also, in my opinion, came from the literary workshop of Valentinus.

The whole MS. of the Coptic translator seems to have been copied by some ignorant copyist, who The Copyist. made many mistakes of orthography. It was copied by one man as a task, and hurriedly executed; and I would suggest that two copies were then made and occasionally a page of one copy substituted for a page of the other; and, as the pages were not quite exact to a word or phrase, we may thus account for some puzzling repetitions and some equally puzzling lacunae. This copy was conjecturally made towards the end of the fourth century.

What was the history of the MS. after this date is impossible even to conjecture. Its history must, however, have been exciting enough for it to have escaped the hands of fanatics—both Christian and Mohammedan. During this period some of the pages were lost.

The contents of the inferior MS. of the Bruce Codex presumably had somewhat similar adventures, may even have come from the same distributing Coptic centre.

It would be entirely out of place in these short

sketches to enter on a critical investigation into the nature of the æonology, cosmology, soteriology, christology, and eschatology of these documents, and attempt to trace their modifications. The evolution of the universe is according to a certain order, but its involution seems to change that order; the soteriology modifies the æonology and cosmology. It is, in my opinion, because of this, rather than for any other reason, that the scheme underlying the Extracts and The Book of the Great Logos is said to be an “older form” than that underlying the Pistis treatise.

The Scheme presupposed in these Treatises.The scheme underlying the Pistis Sophia has been industriously analysed by Köstlin and revised and corrected by Schmidt, who has also endeavoured to trace the modification of the general scheme underlying the Extracts (hitherto erroneously called the Fourth Book of Pistis Sophia) and The Book of the Great Logos, and of the scheme presupposed in the Pistis Sophia,—modifications brought about by the revelation of the new glories of the three Spaces of the Inheritance in the last treatise.

As the general outlines of the scheme underlying the Pistis Sophia may be of service to the reader, we will give it here, but it should be understood that it represents only one configuration of the cosmic mystery, at a certain moment of time, or in a certain phase of consciousness.

The Ineffable.

The Limbs of the Ineffable.

I. The Highest Light-world, or The Kingdom of Light.

i. The First Space of the Ineffable.

ii. The Second Space of the Ineffable, or the First Space of the First Mystery. ii. The Second Space of the First Mystery.

II. The Higher (or Middle) Light-world.

i. The Treasure of Light.

ii. The Place of the Right.

iii. The Place of the Midst.

III. The Lower Light- or Æon-world (The Mixture of Light and Matter).

i. The Place of the Left.

1. The Thirteenth Æon.

2. The Twelve Æons.

3. The Fate.

4. The Sphere.

5. The Rulers of the Ways of the Midst.

6. The Lower Firmament.

ii. The World of Men.

iii. The Under-world.

1. Amenti.

2. Chaos.

3. Outer Darkness.

We now come to a brief consideration of the superior MS. of the Bruce Codex. Here also wè must rule out of place any attempt to grapple with an exposition of the system presupposed by the compiler or compilers, in spite of the following opinion and high appreciation of Schmidt, who in his Introduction (pp. 34 and 35) writes:

“What a different world on the contrary meets us in our thirty-one leaves! We find ourselves in the pure spheres of the highest Plērōma,

see step by step this world, so rich in heavenly An Appreciation of the Untitled Treatise. beings, coming into existence before our eyes; each individual space with all its inmates is minutely described, so that we can form for ourselves a living picture of the glory and splendour of this Gnostic heaven. The speculations are not so confused and fantastic as those of the Pistis Sophia and our two Books of Jeū; here everything is in full harmony and logical sequence. The author is imbued with the Greek spirit, equipped with a full knowledge of Greek philosophy, full of the doctrine of the Platonic ideas, an adherent of Plato’s view of the origin of evil—that is to say Hylē (Matter). Here it is not Christ who is the organ of all communications to the disciples; it is not Jesus who is God’s envoy, and the redeemer and bringer of the mysteries; but we possess in these leaves a magnificently conceived work by an old Gnostic philosopher, and we stand astonished, marvelling at the boldness of the speculations, dazzled by the richness of the thought, touched by the depth of soul of the author. This is not, like the Pistis Sophia, the product of declining Gnosticism, but dates from a period when Gnostic genius like a mighty eagle left the world behind it, and soared in wide and ever wider circles towards pure light, towards pure knowledge, in which it lost itself in ecstasy.

“In one word, we possess in this Gnostic work as regards age and contents a work of the very highest importance, which takes us into a period of Gnosticism, and therefore of Christianity, of which

very little knowledge has been handed down to us.”

Not to be attributed to a Single Author.While cordially agreeing with Schmidt in his last paragraph, and in his high appreciation of the sublimity of the contents of this MS., we must venture to differ from him as to the clearness and logical order of the contents as at present preserved to us. If all is so clear and in such logical sequence, it is surprising that Schmidt has made no attempt to explain the contents. Many and many an hour have I puzzled over the contents of his translation and tried to get them into order, but I have as yet always failed. The result of my study, however, has led me to differ from Schmidt’s assumption that the work is by a single author.

The Apocalyptic Basis.My present conclusion, which is of course put forward as entirely tentative, is that the underlying matter was originally in the form of an apocalypse, a series of visions of some subtle phase of the inner ordering and substance of things. I would suggest that these visions were not in an ordered sequence, but were written down, or taken down, at different times as the seer described the inner working of nature from different points of view. The original writer was clearly, as it seems to me, an adherent of the Basilidian Gnosis, imbued with its teaching and nomenclature; but he had his own illumination as well, and, seeing some of the things of which he had been taught, in high enthusiasm and inspired confidence, he sang of the greater things by analogy

with the lower he had seen—even these lower being so glorious that he could not express them as they really are.

The Overworking.These apocalyptic visions were elaborately expanded and annotated and welded into a unity (the first part being cosmogonical, and the second soteriological) by a writer of great knowledge and wide reading, who was not only familiar with all the Gnostic literature of his time, but also had seen the things for himself; he laboured to make a consistent treatise with the apocalyptic material, on which he set a very high value, as a basis; but he often did not succeed, and clearly states that it is impossible for any “tongue of flesh” to tell of such sublime mysteries.

I am strongly persuaded that the overwriting of this apocalypsis belongs to the same circle of literary activity of which we have been already treating. In it I think we have another specimen of the attempts to re-edit and syntheticize the Gnosis, of which the main attempt is associated with the activity of Valentinus. As to the history of the Greek original, it parallels presumably that of the Pistis Sophia original. It was probably translated about the same time, and had adventures of a somewhat similar nature.

THE AKHMĪM CODEX.

WE have now to lay before our readers what little information is at present available with regard to the latest find in Gnosticism. Ten years ago, Dr. Carl Schmidt informed me that he had hopes of bringing out a work on the subject (including presumably a text and translation) in some two years; but unfortunately his anxiously-awaited labours have not yet seen the light. We are, therefore, entirely dependent upon the report of the important communication made by him to the Royal Prussian Academy of Sciences (Kgl. preuss. Acad. d. Wissenschaften) published in the Transactions, and dated July 16th, 1896.

Schmidt’s communication, entitled A “Pre-irenæic Gnostic Original Work in Coptic” (“Ein vorirenaeisches gnostisches Original-werk in koptischer Sprache”), proves the enormous importance of the happy discovery. His paper is of course exceedingly technical and learned, but the following summary will give the reader a general idea of a subject which at present can only appeal to a very limited number of specialists, but which ought in time to be familiar to all serious students of Christian theosophy.

In January, 1896, Dr. Rheinhardt procured at Cairo, from a dealer of antiquities from Akhmīm, The MS. and its Contents. this precious papyrus MS., which he asserted had been discovered by a fellah in a niche in a wall. The MS. is now in the Berlin Egyptian Museum, each leaf being carefully protected with glass.

Unfortunately the MS. is not entirely perfect; it contained originally seventy-one leaves—six of which are now missing; each page contains about eighteen to twenty-two lines. The writing is of extraordinary beauty, and points to the fifth century.

After a short preface, the MS. bears the superscription Gospel according to Mary, and on p. 77 the subscription Apocryphon of John; immediately on the same page follows the title Wisdom of Jesus Christ, and on p. 128 the same subscription; the next page begins without a title, but at the end of the MS. we find the subscription Acts of Peter.

The MS. therefore contains three distinct treatises, The Gospel of Mary and The Apocryphon of John being the same piece.

The Gospel of Mary.The first work begins with the words: “Now it came to pass on one of these days, when John the brother of James—the sons of Zebedee—had gone up to the temple, that a Pharisee, named Ananias (?), came unto him and said unto him: ‘Where is thy Master, that thou dost not follow him?’ He said unto him: ‘From whence He came thither is He gone (?).’ The Pharisee said unto him: ‘With deceit hath the Nazaræan deceived you, for he hath … you and made away with the tradition of your fathers.’ When I heard this I went away from the temple to the mountain unto a solitary place, and was exceedingly sorrowful in heart and said: ‘How now was the Saviour chosen; and wherefore was He sent to the world by His Father who sent Him; and who is His Father; and what is the formation of that æon to which we shall go?’”

While he is sunk in these thoughts, the heavens open, and the Lord appears to him and to the disciples, in order to resolve his doubts. The Saviour then leaves them, and again they are sorrowful and weep. They said: “How can we go to the heathen and preach the gospel of the kingdom of the Son of Man? If they have not received Him, how will they receive us?”

Then Mary arose, and, having embraced them all, spake unto her brethren: “Weep not, and be not sorrowful, nor doubt, for His grace will be with you all and will overshadow you. Let us rather praise His goodness that he hath prepared us, and made us to be men.”

Peter requests her to proclaim what the Lord had revealed to her, thus acknowledging the great distinction which the Lord had always permitted her above all women. Thereupon she begins the narrative of an appearance of the Lord in a dream; unfortunately some pages are here missing.

Hardly has she finished, when Andrew rises, and says that he cannot believe that the Lord has given such novel teachings. Peter also rejects her testimony and chides her. And Mary in tears says unto him: “Peter, of what dost thou think? Believest thou that I have imagined this only in myself, or lied as to the Lord?”

And now Levi comes forward to help Mary, and chides Peter as an eternal quarreller. How the dispute went on we cannot determine, as two pages are missing. On p. 21 a new episode begins and continues to the end of the first treatise without a break.

The Lord appears again to John, and John

immediately repairs to his fellow-disciples and relates what the Saviour had revealed unto him.

Schmidt suggests that the original title was The Apocalypse or Revelation, and not The Apocryphon of John.

The Wisdom of Jesus Christ.The book of the Wisdom of Jesus Christ begins with the words: “After His resurrection from the dead His twelve disciples and seven women disciples had gone into Galilee to the mount which … . for they were in doubt as to the hypostasis of the All … . as to the mysteries and holy economy. Then did the Saviour appear unto them not in His prior form but in the invisible spirit. His form was that of a great angel of light, His substance indescribable, and He was not clothed in flesh that dieth, but in pure, perfect flesh, as He taught us on the mountain in Galilee which was called … He said: ‘Peace be unto you; My peace I give unto you.’” And they were all astonished and were afraid.

And the Lord bids them lay all their questions before Him; and the several disciples bring forward their doubts and receive the desired replies.

The Acts of Peter are likewise of Gnostic origin, and belong to the great group of apocryphal stories of the Apostles. This third document treats of an episode from the healing-wonders of Peter.

Irenæus Quotes from the Gospel of Mary.The importance of the whole MS. is, not only that it hands down to us three hitherto unknown Gnostic writings, but especially that it gives us a work which was known to Irenæus, our first important “authority” on Gnosticism among the Fathers

a work from which he made extracts, but without giving the sources of his information or quoting the title of the book. This work is The Gospel of Mary.

Irenæus begins the last section of his first Book (29-31) with the words: “And besides these, from among those whom we have before mentioned as followers of Simon, a multitude of Barbēlō-Gnostics hath arisen, and they have shown themselves as mushrooms from the ground.”

In cap. 29 he treats mostly of a group of so-called Barbēlō-Gnostics, with regard to whom he gives the contents of one of the books they used, a teaching which we do not find put forward by either the earlier or later hæresiarchs. Theodoret (I. 13) among the rest of the Refutators alone knows of this teaching, and he simply copies Irenæus.

This source is our Gospel of Mary; and we can now for the first time control Irenæus point by point, and see how little the Church Father succeeded or could succeed in reproducing the exceedingly complicated systems of the Gnostic schools. A few examples will be sufficient to establish this point abundantly.

Irenæus begins his exposition with these words: “Some of them suppose a certain never-ageing An Examination of his Statements. Æon in a Virginal Spirit, whom they name Barbēlō. Where they say is a certain unnameable Father.”

This “Father of All” is characterized in our new document (p. 22) as the Invisible; as Pure The Father. Light, in which no one can see with mortal eyes; as Spirit, for no one can imagine how He is

formed; the Everlasting, the Unspeakable; the Unnameable, for no one existed before Him to give Him a name. Of Him it is said: “He thinketh His Image alone and beholdeth it in the Water of Pure Light which surroundeth Him. And His Thought energized and revealed herself, and stood before Him in the Light-spark; which is the Power which existed before the All, which Power hath revealed itself; which is the perfect Forethought of the All; the Light, the Likeness of the Light, the Image of the The Mother.Invisible; that is, the perfect Power, the Barbēlō, the Æon perfect in glory—glorifying Him, because she hath manifested herself in Him and thinketh Him. She is the first Thought, his Image; she becometh the First Man; that is, the Virginal Spirit, she of the triple Manhood, the triple-powered one, the triple-named, triple-born; the Æon which ages not, the Man-woman, who hath come forth from His Forethought.”

According to this, the “Father of the All” stands at the head of the system, the “Invisible.” After Him comes His “Image,” that is, the “Barbēlō,” the “perfect Power,” the “unageing Æon” of Irenæus.

By thinking of His Image, His Thought reveals herself in the Light-spark, that is, in Barbēlō.

Irenæus gives all this in a short, incomprehensible abstract as follows: “And that He was fain to manifest Himself to the same Barbēlō. And that Thought came forth and stood before Him, and asked for Foreknowledge.”

Our text then proceeds: “And Barbēlō besought The Pentad. Him to give unto her Foreknowledge. He nodded,

and when He had thus nodded assent, Foreknowledge manifested herself and stood with Thought, that is Forethought, and glorified the Invisible and the perfect Power, the Barbēlō, for that through her she had come into existence.

“Again this Power besought that Incorruptibility be given unto her. He nodded, and when He had thus nodded assent, Incorruptibility manifested herself and stood with Thought and Foreknowledge, glorifying the Invisible and Barbēlō, in that through her she had come into existence.

“For their sakes she besought that Everlasting Life be given them. He nodded, and when He had thus nodded assent, Everlasting Life manifested herself, and they stood and glorified Him and Barbēlō, because through her they had come into existence in the manifestation of the Invisible Spirit.

“This is the pentad of the Æons of the Father, that is, the First Man, the Image of the Invisible; that is, Barbēlō, and Thought, and Foreknowledge, and Incorruptibility and Life Everlasting.”

At the request of Barbēlō, also, the Invisible causes to come forth after Thought the three following feminine Æons, according to Irenæus; “Thought asked for Foreknowledge; Foreknowledge also having come forth, again upon their petition came forth Incorruptibility; then afterwards Life Eternal; in whom Barbēlō rejoicing, and looking forth into the greatness, and delighted with her conception, generated into it a Light like unto it; her they affirm to be the beginning of the enlightening and generation of all things; and that

the Father seeing this Light anointed it with His goodness to make it perfect; and this they say is the Christ.”

The Decad.In this passage without doubt Irenæus had before his eyes the words: “He is the decad of the Æons, that is, He is the Father of the ingenerable Father. Barbēlō gazed into Him fixedly … and she gave birth to a blessed Light-spark. Nor doth it differ from her in greatness. This is the Alone-begotten, who hath manifested himself in the Father, the self-generated God, the first-born Son of the All, the pure Light-spirit. Now the Invisible Spirit rejoiced over the Light, which had come into existence, which had first of all manifested itself in the first Power—that is, His Forethought—in Barbēlō. And He anointed him with His goodness, that he might be made perfect.”

This Alone-begotten is consequently identical with the Light or the Christ. Irenæus offers us here no enlightenment, and further on he only gives us the sentence: Therefore the First Angel, who stands near the Alone-begotten,” etc.

The Alone-begotten asks for Mind to be given him; when this has been done, he praises, as Mind, the Father and Barbēlō.

Irenæus continues: “And this, they say, is Christ; who again requests, as they say, that Mind may be given to help him; and then came forth Mind; and after these the Father sends forth the Word.”

In this place Irenæus has omitted a stage and quite forgotten the third male Æon, namely, Will. Our MS. gives us the following:

“The Invisible Spirit willed to energize. His Will energized and revealed itself and stood with the Mind and the Light praising Him. The Word followed the Will, for through the Word hath Christ created all things.”

With this the upper Ogdoad is shut off from the Decad, the lower æon proceeding from separate pairs. The Christ. Next we have the Self-begotten from Thought, the Word, of whom it is written: “Whom He hath honoured with great honour, because he came forth from His first Thought. The Invisible hath set him as God over the All. The True God gave him all powers, and made the Truth that is in Him subject unto him, that he might think out the All.”

Irenæus reproduces this as follows: “Then afterwards, of Mind and the Word, they say, was sent forth the Self-begotten, to represent the Great Light, and that he was highly honoured, and all things made subject unto him. And the Truth was sent out also with him, and that there is a conjunction of the Self-begotten and Truth.”

(It is impossible at present to attempt to analyze the system from the above fragments; it may, however, be suggested that the treatise is here exposing the three root-phases, or moments of emanation, of the Plērōma, or ideal world: (a) the In-generable, (b) the Self-generable, and (c) the Generable—the Father, the Logos, the All. The Gnosis, however, is more elaborate than any other known system, and its idealistic intuitions of primal processes know no limits.)

From the Light of the Christ and the Incorruptible proceed forth four great Lights to surround the Self-begotten. Their names are Harmozel, Ōroiael, Daveithe and Eleleth. From Will and Everlasting Life proceed four others: Charis, Synesis, Aisthesis and Phronesis. Irenæus writes:

“And from the Light which is Christ, and Incorruptibility, four Luminaries were sent forth to surround the Self-begotten; and that from Will again and Life Everlasting, four such emanations were sent forth to minister under the four Luminaries, which they call Grace (Charis), Free-will (Thelesis), Understanding (Synesis), and Prudence (Phronesis). And that Charis for her part was conjoined with the great and first Luminary; and this they will have to be the Saviour, and call him Harmogen; and Thelesis with the second, whom also they call Raguel; and Synesis with the third, whom they name David; and Phronesis with the fourth, whom they name Eleleth.”

This passage is of interest in many ways. We learn the correct names; we notice that three of them (Eleleth, Daveithe, Ōroiael) are also to be found in the Codex Brucianus, and thus we establish the relation of this important Codex with the first piece in our MS.

The Egyptian Origin of the Treatise.These proofs are sufficient to establish the point that The Gospel of Mary was composed before A.D. 180, and that the Greek original, from which the Coptic translation was made, was earlier than Irenæus. In the opinion of Dr. Schmidt, the work originated in Egypt. The School which used it was the same as that designated by

[paragraph continues] Irenæus as the Barbēlō-Gnostics, or, as they usually called themselves, simply the Gnostics; this School was further subdivided into many single denominations, whose names and teachings Epiphanius has given us in detail. Among them were circulated many books under the name of Mary; thus Epiphanius (Hær., xxvi. 8) speaks of The Questions of Mary, both The Great and The Little, and even in xii. of The Genealogy of Mary. Celsus had previously also met with this School, and perhaps was acquainted with our work, for he informs us that some heretics derive their origin from Mary and Martha, and gives the well-known diagram of the so-called Ophites. Yet more; our original work shows us that Irenæus “copied” from our book only up to a certain place; and in I. 30, he used a second work of the same School which had fallen into his hands.

So far Dr. Schmidt, whose interesting communication is followed by a note of Professor Harnack. Harnack gives his opinion as follows:

“This find is of the first importance to primitive Church history; not only because we have one The Opinion of Harnack. (or perhaps three) original Gnostic works of the second century—(is the Wisdom of Jesus Christ possibly the famous work of Valentinus?)—but kind fate has also added to our debt that Irenæus has quoted from one of the three treatises. We are thus for the first time in a position to control by the original the presentation of a Gnostic system as rendered by the Church Father. The result of this examination shows, as we might

have expected, that owing to omissions, and because no effort was made to understand his opponents, the sense of the by no means absurd speculations of the Gnostics has been ruined by the Church Father. Another fact—which can only with the greatest difficulty be extracted from the writings of their opponents—is that the system treats of a psychological process within the first principle, which the Gnostics desired to unfold. Tertullian certainly says once (Adv. Valent., iv.): ‘Ptolemæus, the pupil of Valentinus, split up the names and numbers of the æons into personified “substances,” external to deity, whereas Valentinus himself had included these in the very summit of the godhead as the impressions of sensation and feeling’—but which of the Church Fathers has given himself the trouble thus to understand the speculations of Valentinus and of the other Gnostics?

“According to Hippolytus (Philos., vi. 42), the followers of the Gnostic Marcus complained of the misrepresentation of their teaching by Irenæus; the followers of our newly discovered book could also have complained of the incomprehensible fashion in which Irenæus had represented their teachings.

“Thus, we had previously known a Gnostic work which probably originated in Egypt in the second century, only through an epitome of it by a Gallic bishop about the year 185, and now we find it again in a Coptic translation of the fifth century—verily a paradoxical method of transmission!”

If, however, the last chapters of Book I. of Irenæus are copied from the lost Syntagma of Justin or some

other earlier work, as the best critics have previously maintained, then the original of our new document has a considerably earlier date than Schmidt or Harnack assign to it in the above Transaction.

The student of Gnosticism will at once perceive that the importance of the new find cannot be over-estimated. The Importance of the MS. The new documents throw light not only on the Codex Brucianus, but also on the system of the Pistis Sophia. We have now these three original sources on which to base our study of Gnostic theosophy; and there is hope that at last something may be done to rescue the views of the best Gnostic doctors from obscurity, and from the environment of pious refutation in which they have been previously smothered. The task of the sympathetic student should now be to find appropriate terms for the technicalities of the Gnosis, place the various orders of ideas in their proper relation, and show that the method of the Gnosis, which looked at the problems of cosmogony and anthropogony from above, may be as reasonable in its proper domain as are the methods of modern scientific research, which regard such problems entirely from below. We should not forget that men like Valentinus were theosophists, engaged on precisely the same studies as their brethren the world over. The greatest cosmogonies of the world are of the same nature as Gnostic cosmogenesis, and a study of these will convince us of the similarity of source. Gnostic anthropogenesis has many points of similarity with general theosophical ideas, and Gnostic psychology is in a great measure borne out by recent research. The

[paragraph continues] Gnostic technical terms are no more difficult of comprehension than those found in other theosophical writers; and there is an exact parallel between the varying use made of such terms by different writers on the Gnosis and the misrepresentation of the views of the Gnostics by the Church Fathers, and the various meanings given to like terms by other theosophical writers and the misrepresentation of such writers by their critics. The Gnostics were themselves partly to blame for their obscurity, and the Church Fathers were partly to blame for their misrepresentation. In brief, the same standard of criticism has to be applied to the writings of the Gnostics as the discriminating student has to apply to all such literature. It is true that to-day we speak openly of many things that the Gnostics wrapped up in symbol and myth; nevertheless our real knowledge on such subjects is not so very far in advance of the great doctors of the Gnosis as we are inclined to imagine; now, as then, there are only a few who really know what they are writing about, while the rest copy, compare, adapt, and speculate.

SOME FORGOTTEN SAYINGS.

IN the early centuries of Christianity there were in circulation many traditions, legends, and religious romances, called Memoirs, Acts, and Gospels, which contained Sayings-of-the-Lord or Logoi. These Logoi or Logia were oracles, or oracular utterances, couched in the same language and of much the same tenour as the prophetic utterances of the members of the Schools of the Prophets, which were introduced by the solemn formula, “Thus saith the Lord,” when recorded in the books of the Old Covenant of the Jewish race.

In course of time certain of these traditional, legendary and mythical settings of the Logoi were declared to be alone historical, and a canon of orthodox tradition was evolved from the second half of the second century onwards. I use the term “mythical” in its best sense, that is to say, stories embodying in a designed symbolic fashion the teachings of the mysteries, concerning the nature of God, the universe and the human soul.

As only a few out of the many writings were selected, a large number of Logoi was thus rejected. Rejected Logoi. The latest collection of these rejected Logoi has been made by Resell, and was published in 1889 in Gebhardt and Harnack’s series of Texte und Untersuchungen, under the title of Agrapha: Äussercanonische Evangelienfragmente.

Some of these extra-canonical fragments are variants of the familiar canonical Sayings, and are of interest mainly for the reconstruction of one of the

root-sources from which the synoptic compilers drew their information. A few have been preserved in the Pauline Letters. Others are entirely unfamiliar to those who are only acquainted with the canonical selection of the books of the New Covenant, generally called the New Testament. These Logoi are of special interest to students of the origins, and I therefore append a selection of them translated from Resch’s text.

It may be mentioned that some of these Logoi have been worked into a religious novel by a Jewish writer, under the title As Others Saw Him, published in 1895, at London, by William Heinemann.

Be merciful that ye may obtain mercy; forgive that it may be forgiven unto you; as ye do so shall it be done to you; as ye give so shall it be given unto you; as ye judge so shall ye be judged; as ye do service so shall service be done to you; with what measure ye mete, with the same shall it be measured to you in return.

Wisdom sendeth forth her children.

He who is near Me is near the fire; and he who is far from Me is far from the kingdom.

If ye observe not the little [sci., mystery], who will give you the great?

They who would see Me and reach My kingdom need must attain Me with pain and suffering.

Good must needs come, but blessed is he by whom it cometh; in like manner also evil must needs come, but woe unto him by whom it cometh.

The weak shall be saved by the strong.

Guard the mysteries for Me and for the sons of My house.

Cleave to the holy ones, for they who cleave to them are made holy.

The fashion of this world passeth away.

[Fashion—that is, configuration (σχῆμα), for there are other worlds and other phases of this world].

As often as ye eat this bread and drink this cup make proclamation of My death and confession in My resurrection and ascension until I come [to you].

[A variant gives the saying in the third person, and speaks of the “death of the Son of the Man,” the Logos. The Master promises to return to His disciples at the time of the performance of a certain holy rite.]

Be ye mindful of faith and hope, through whom is born that love to God and man which giveth life eternal.

There is a mingling that leadeth to death, and there is a mingling that leadeth to life.

Beholding a certain man working on the Sabbath., He said unto him: Man, if thou knowest what thou doest thou art blessed; but if thou knowest not, thou art accursed and a transgressor of the law.

Why do ye wonder at the signs? I give unto you a mighty inheritance which the whole world doth not contain.

When the Lord was asked by a certain man, When should His kingdom come, He saith unto him: When two shall be one, and the without as the within, and the male with the female, neither male nor female.

Call not any one “Father” on earth, for on earth

there are rulers [only]; in heaven is the Father from whom is every descent [that is, “blood descent from a father” (πατριά)] both in heaven and on earth.

Grieve not the Holy Spirit which is in you, and put not out the Light which hath shone forth in you.

As ye see yourselves in water or mirror, so see ye Me in yourselves.

As I find you, so will I judge you.

Seek for the great [mysteries] and the little shall be added to you; seek for the heavenly and the earthly shall be added to you.

Be ye approved money-changers, rejecting the bad and retaining the good.

Keep thy flesh pure.

Because of the sick I was sick; because of the hungry I was ahungered; because of the thirsty I was athirst.

Not rendering evil for evil, or railing for railing, or fist for fist, or curse for curse.

Love hideth a multitude of sins.

There are false christs and false teachers who have blasphemed the Spirit of Grace, and have spit forth its gift of grace; these shall not be forgiven either in this æon or in the æon to come.

[Grace is the “power above,” the power of the Logos which makes a man a “christ.” Charis or Grace is the consort of the Logos, His power or shakti. The false “christs” are those who have been “initiated” and broken their vows. The æon is a certain time-period.]

For the Heavenly Father willeth the repentance of the sinner rather than his chastisement.

For God willeth that all should receive of His gifts.

Keep that which thou hast, and it shall be increased into more.

Behold, I make the last as the first.

I am come to end the sacrifices, and if ye cease not from sacrificing, the wrath shall not cease from you.

[Woe unto him] who hath made sad the spirit of his brother.

And never rejoice unless ye see your brother [also] happy.

He who hath wondered shall reign, and he who hath reigned shall rest.

[This is a dark saying; it has been compared to the phrase of Plato: “There is no other beginning of philosophy than wondering”—that is to say, regarding the works of the Deity with wonder and reverence. This is the beginning of philosophy, or gnosis, and the end of it makes the man king of himself, and thus master of gods and men; thus is he at peace.]

My mother, the Holy Spirit, even now took me by one of the hairs of my head and carried me to the great mountain Tabor.

[The hairs of the head may perhaps symbolise the nādi’s, as they are called in the Upanishads, by which the soul goes forth from the body; the mountain is the way up to the spiritual regions.]

He who seeketh me shall find me in children from seven years [onwards]; for hidden in them I am manifested in the fourteenth period (æon).

[This may refer either to the higher ego or light-spark from the Logos, or to certain degrees of initiation, the initiated having to become as “little children.”]

When Salome asked how long should death hold sway, the Lord said unto her: So long as ye women bring forth; for I came to end the works of the female. And Salome said unto Him: I have then done well in not bringing forth. And the Lord answered and said: Eat of every pasture, but of that which hath the bitterness [of death] eat not. And when Salome asked when should those things of which she enquired be known, the Lord said: When ye shall tread upon the vesture of shame, and when the two shall be one, and the male with the female neither male nor female.

[“Shame” is presumably the same as the “mingling” in one of the Logoi quoted above. To tread on the vesture of shame is to rise above the animal nature.]

Pray for your enemies; blessed are they who mourn over the destruction of the unbelievers.

I stood on a lofty mountain, and saw a gigantic man and another, a dwarf; and I heard as it were a voice of thunder, and drew nigh for to hear; and He spake unto me and said, I am thou and thou art I; and wheresoever thou mayst be I am there. In all am I scattered, and whencesoever thou wiliest, thou gatherest Me; and gathering Me thou gatherest Thyself.

[Here again we have the mountain of initiation. The initiate beholds the vision of the Heavenly Man, the Logos, and of himself, the dwarf; of the Great

[paragraph continues] Man and the little man, the light-spark which sits in the heart.]

May thy Holy Spirit come upon us and purify us [From a very ancient version of the Lord’s Prayer, instead of the clause “Thy kingdom come.”]

Possess nothing upon the earth.

Though ye be gathered together with me in My bosom, if ye do not My commandments, I will cast you forth.

Gain for yourselves, ye sons of Adam, by means of these transitory things which are not yours, that which is your own, and passeth not away.

For even among the prophets after they have been anointed by the Holy Spirit, the word of sin has been found among them.

[That is to say, after they have been made “christs” (μετὰ τὸ χρισθῆναι αὐτοὺς ἐν πνεύματι ἁγίῳ). The “word of sin” means apparently erroneous prophetical utterances.]

If a man shall abandon all for my name’s sake, at the second coming he shall inherit eternal life.

[“For my name’s sake” signifies the power of the Great Name which the Master used in his public preaching; the second coming is the descent of the Christ-spirit upon the candidate at his initiation. “Eternal life” is the life of the æons or spiritual existences, whose lives are an eternity.]

If ye make not the below into the above and the above into the below, the right into the left and the left into the right, the before into the behind [and the behind into the before], ye shall not enter into the kingdom of God.

[That is to say, ye shall not enter into the central point and so pass into the spiritual region.]

I am to be crucified anew.

I recognised myself, and gathered myself together from all sides; I sowed no children for the ruler, but I tore up his roots, and gathered together [my] limbs that were scattered abroad; I know thee who thou art, for I am front the realms above.

[This is the apology, or defence, of the soul of the initiate as it passes through the realms of the unseen world, each of which is in charge of a ruler, the minister of Death. As the Logos gathers together his children (the light-sparks, the limbs of his body), and takes them home into his bosom, so does the ego collect its limbs and becomes the Osirified.]

What ye preach with words before the people, do ye in deeds before every man.

Thou art the key [who openest] for every man, and shuttest for every man.

[This saying is put in the mouth of the disciples; in the direct formula it would read, “I am the key,” &c.]

The Oxyrhynchus Papyrus.Numerous other Logoi could be added from Gnostic literature, especially from the contents of the Coptic Codices; but enough has been given to show the reader that much of the Sayings-material has been rejected and forgotten. How precious some of this matter was, has been lately shown by a recent discovery. The ancient papyrus-fragment discovered on the site of Oxyrhynchus by Grenfell and Hunt, in 1897, preserves for us the most primitive form of the Logoi

known to us. Of the six decipherable Sayings it contains, one is familiar to us, two contain new matter and important variants, and three are entirely new. If the proportion of now unknown to known sayings was as high in the rest of the MS. as in the solitary leaf which has reached us, then we have indeed lost more by the Canon than we have gained.

The new-found Sayings run as follows, omitting the one already familiar to us:

Jesus saith: Except ye fast to the world, ye shall in no wise find the Kingdom of God; and except ye sabbatize the Sabbath, ye shall not see the Father.

Jesus saith: I stood in the midst of the world, and in flesh was I seen of them, and I found all drunken, and none found I athirst among them. And My soul grieveth over the souls of men, because they are blind in their heart and see not… .

Jesus saith: Wheresoever there be two, they are not without God; and wherever there is one alone, I say, I am with him. Raise the stone, and there thou shalt find Me; cleave the wood, and there am I.

[The first part of this saying is exceedingly imperfect; I have followed Blass’s conjectures. See Taylor’s Oxyrhynchus Logia, Oxford; 1899].

Jesus saith: A prophet is not acceptable in his own country, neither doth a physician work cures upon those that know him.

Jesus saith: A city built on the top of a high hill and stablished can neither fall nor be hid.

Jesus saith: Thou hearest with one ear (but the other thou hast closed).

Since the publication of the first edition of this

work the rubbish heaps of ancient Oxyrhynchus have yielded yet another battered scrap of papyrus containing material from a similar collection of sayings, the decipherable portions of which run as follows in Grenfell & Hunt’s edition (New Sayings of Jesus; London, 1904):

These are the … words which Jesus the Living (One) spake to … and Thomas, and He said unto (them): Every one who hearkeneth to these words shall never taste of death.

Jesus saith: Let not him who seeketh … cease until he findeth, and when he findeth he shall wonder; wondering he shall reign, and reigning shall rest.

Jesus saith: (Ye ask? Who are these) that draw us (to the kingdom if) the kingdom is in Heaven? … the fowls of the air, and all beasts that are under the earth or upon the earth, and the fishes of the sea (these are they that draw) you; and the Kingdom of Heaven is within you; and whosoever shall know himself shall find it. (Strive therefore?) to know yourselves, and ye shall be aware that ye are the sons of the … Father; (and?) ye shall know that ye are in (the City of God?), and ye are (the City?).

Jesus saith: Everything that is not before thy face and that which is hidden from thee shall be revealed to thee. For there is nothing hidden which shall not be made manifest, nor buried which shall not be raised.