Gnostic Glossary

How to read a manuscript citation

Every quotation on this site carries a siglum — a compressed address telling you which physical book a sentence comes from, and where in it. The system looks forbidding and takes about ninety seconds to learn. Codex, then tractate number, then page or line: that is nearly all of it.

Spelling varies because these are transliterations from Coptic and Greek: Yaldabaoth is also Ialdabaoth and Ialtabaoth, Barbelo also Barbelon, Achamoth also Achamōth. Nothing hangs on the choice. Where a name is genuinely hard to say, this page gives a plain respelling in parentheses — not a scholarly pronunciation, just enough to say it out loud without flinching.

The three natures, side by side

Three of the terms below only make sense as a set. The Valentinian school, as its opponents describe it, sorted humanity into three kinds according to what a person is made of — and the middle category is the one that made bishops angry, because it is where ordinary faithful churchgoers were filed.

Every ancient description of this scheme comes from a hostile source, chiefly Irenaeus, so treat the hard boundaries with suspicion. Some scholars read the three as fixed classes of people; others — Elaine Pagels and Einar Thomassen among them — argue that the Valentinian sources are far less deterministic than their opponents made them sound. The texts themselves are less tidy than either summary — see hylics, psychics and pneumatics for the argument in full.

A

Abraxas (uh-BRAK-sus)

Abraxas is a power-name whose seven Greek letters add up to 365, used by the second-century Alexandrian teacher Basilides for the ruler presiding over 365 heavens. It survives mostly on carved gems — a rooster-headed figure with serpent legs, shield and whip — which were amulets, not catechisms, and were cut by people who may never have read a word of Basilides. Everything we know of his system comes through hostile summaries by Irenaeus and Hippolytus, which disagree with each other.

Appears in: Abraxas · What is Gnosticism?

Achamoth (AH-kha-moth)

Achamoth is the lower Sophia of Valentinian myth — the passion cast outside the divine fullness, from whose grief, fear and turning the material world is congealed. The name is a Greek spelling of a Semitic word for wisdom, and the doubling is the point: Wisdom stays safe inside the Pleroma while her severed longing becomes the raw stuff of everything below. Irenaeus reports the scheme in detail around 180 CE, which is why it reads like a system rather than a story.

Appears in: Sophia · Sethian vs. Valentinian · Valentinus

Aeon (EE-on)

An aeon is not a length of time but a living divine being — one of the eternal powers whose totality is the fullness of God. The Greek aiōn does also mean “age,” and gnostic writers exploit both senses at once: these beings are ages, and the ages are alive. Valentinian teaching counts thirty of them, arranged in male–female pairs, with Sophia the youngest and the one who goes wrong.

Appears in: Pleroma and the aeons · The Monad

Anthropos (AN-thro-pos)

Anthropos is Greek for “human being,” used in gnostic and Hermetic myth for the heavenly Human — the divine form the lower powers copy when they mold Adam. In Poimandres the Man is born of Mind, breaks through the planetary spheres, and is caught by his own reflection in Nature; loving the image, he falls into it. That is why the myth insists the body is a likeness of something higher and a trap at the same time.

Appears in: Poimandres · The gnostic creation myth

Apocryphon (uh-POK-rih-fon)

An apocryphon is a “hidden book” — a work presented as revelation delivered privately to a disciple rather than preached in public. The word is a title, not a verdict: the Secret Book of James (NHC I,2) and the Secret Book of John both carry it. The same claim opens Thomas — “These are the hidden sayings that the living Jesus spoke and Didymos Judas Thomas wrote down.” (NHC II,2, tr. Mattison) — and that word hidden is exactly what the bishops objected to.

Appears in: The Secret Book of James · The Secret Book of John · What are the lost gospels?

Apolytrosis (ah-poh-LIT-ro-sis)

Apolytrosis means “redemption,” and names a Valentinian rite of release that Irenaeus describes and the Gospel of Philip lists among the mysteries. Philip counts five: “The Lord [did] everything in a mystery: a baptism, a chrism, a Eucharist, a redemption, a bridal chamber…” (NHC II 65–68, tr. Mattison). What the rite involved is genuinely unclear — Irenaeus reports several incompatible versions, and no gnostic text sets out an order of service.

Appears in: The Gospel of Philip · What is the bridal chamber?

Archon (AR-kon)

An archon is a “ruler” — one of the powers who govern the cosmos below the divine world and who obstruct the soul trying to get past them. They are usually seven, matched to the visible planets, and their chief is the Demiurge. The picture is not primarily about demons; it is about how much of a life is administered by forces that never asked your consent.

Appears in: Archons · Yaldabaoth

Autogenes (aw-TOH-jen-ees)

Autogenes means “self-generated” and names the divine Son who comes forth from the Monad through Barbelo in Sethian texts. Translators render it “the Self-Begotten” — as in the Gospel of Judas, where the cosmos is measured out by “…the seventy-two luminaries with the Self-Begotten…” (Codex Tchacos 47–55, tr. Mattison). He is the pattern of the luminous world, several removes above anything that makes matter.

Appears in: The Gospel of Judas · The Secret Book of John

B

Barbelo (BAR-buh-loh)

Barbelo is the first emanation of the invisible Spirit in Sethian myth — the Forethought who is the divine Mother and the mirror in which the One first knows itself. Judas greets Jesus by her name: “You've come from the immortal realm of Barbelo…” (Gospel of Judas, Codex Tchacos 33–36, tr. Mattison). She is not a second god beside the first; she is the first god's self-awareness, and every later being descends through her.

Appears in: The Gospel of Judas · The Secret Book of John · Sethian vs. Valentinian

Berlin Codex

The Berlin Codex (BG 8502) is a Coptic papyrus book bought in Cairo in 1896 that holds the only substantial copy of the Gospel of Mary. It also carries the Secret Book of John, the Sophia of Jesus Christ and the Act of Peter. Its publication was cursed: a burst water main destroyed the printing, then two wars intervened, and Walter Till did not get the editio princeps out until 1955. It is not from the Nag Hammadi jar — the single most common mistake made about the Gospel of Mary.

Appears in: The Gospel of Mary · The Gospel of Mary's missing pages

Bridal chamber

The bridal chamber is the central sacrament of the Gospel of Philip: the reunion of a divided self with its heavenly counterpart, imagined as a marriage. Philip is blunt about who it is for — “A bridal chamber isn't for the animals, nor for the slaves, nor for the impure, but it's for free people and virgins.” (NHC II 68–73, tr. Mattison). Whether it was an enacted rite, a metaphor for that reunion, or both at once is still argued.

Appears in: What is the bridal chamber? · The Gospel of Philip

Bythos (BEE-thos)

Bythos means “Depth” and is the Valentinian name for the unbegotten Father at the head of the Pleroma, paired with Sigē, “Silence.” The pairing is doctrine in miniature: the source of everything is depth and silence, so nothing said about it can be adequate. It is one of the several names — with the Monad and the invisible Spirit — for the same unknowable One.

Appears in: The Monad · Valentinus

C

Canon

The canon is the list of books a church reads publicly as scripture, and it formed slowly by inclusion rather than at any single council. The first surviving list identical to today's twenty-seven New Testament books is Athanasius's festal letter of 367 CE. Nicaea (325) discussed the nature of Christ and the date of Easter; its records do not touch the canon at all, whatever the internet says.

Appears in: Who decided what went in the Bible? · Books removed from the Bible

Cartonnage (KAR-tun-ahzh)

Cartonnage is waste papyrus pasted in layers to stiffen a leather book cover — and it is how the Nag Hammadi codices were dated. Scrap is dateable in a way scripture is not: the sheets inside those covers include receipts and letters carrying dates in the 340s CE, which puts the binding — and so the burial — in the second half of the fourth century. Rubbish is the best witness archaeology has.

Appears in: The Nag Hammadi discovery · Why were the gnostic gospels buried?

Cathars (KATH-arz)

The Cathars were medieval dualist Christians of southern France and northern Italy, destroyed by the Albigensian Crusade and the Inquisition in the thirteenth century. They are routinely called gnostic, and they did teach an evil world-maker and a soul that belongs elsewhere. But no line of transmission from the ancient texts to them has ever been demonstrated, and nearly everything we know about their beliefs comes from inquisitors' records — hostile witnesses again.

Appears in: Do gnostics still exist? · What is Gnosticism?

Chrism (KRIZ-um)

Chrism is anointing oil and the rite that uses it, which the Gospel of Philip rates above baptism because “Christ” itself means “anointed.” Philip traces it to Eden: “…from the olive tree came the chrism, and from that the resurrection.” (NHC II 73–79, tr. Mattison). In its five-mystery sequence the chrism stands between baptism and the bridal chamber.

Appears in: The Gospel of Philip · What is the bridal chamber?

Codex (KOH-deks)

A codex is a book with pages bound at the spine, as against a scroll — the format early Christians adopted with unusual enthusiasm. The plural is codices. Thirteen of them came out of the jar at Nag Hammadi in December 1945, leather-bound, papyrus inside. The format matters to the story of the canon: a codex can hold four gospels between two covers, and a scroll cannot.

Appears in: The Nag Hammadi discovery · The complete Nag Hammadi list

Codex Tchacos (CHAH-kos)

Codex Tchacos is the late-fourth or early-fifth-century Coptic papyrus book that carries the only known copy of the Gospel of Judas. It resurfaced in the twentieth century, spent years deteriorating in private hands — including a long spell in a safe-deposit box — and was conserved, translated and published in 2006. Its Judas is fragmentary, and the disputed readings in it are real scholarship, not marketing.

Appears in: The Gospel of Judas · What is the Gospel of Judas about?

Coptic (KOP-tik)

Coptic is the last stage of the Egyptian language, written in Greek letters plus a few signs borrowed from demotic, and it is the language of nearly every gnostic manuscript we have. The Nag Hammadi texts are mostly in the Sahidic dialect and are translations from Greek originals that no longer exist. So a saying of Jesus in Thomas reaches us through Coptic, from Greek, from Aramaic speech — three languages of distance, which is why translators disagree.

Appears in: The Gospel of Thomas · The Nag Hammadi discovery

D

Demiurge (DEM-ee-urj)

The Demiurge is the craftsman who made the material world and, in gnostic myth, wrongly believes he is the only god there is. Plato used dēmiourgos admiringly in the Timaeus for the maker who copies eternal forms. The gnostic writers kept the word and inverted the verdict: the copy is a prison, and its maker is ignorant rather than evil — which is worse, and more interesting.

Appears in: The Demiurge · Yaldabaoth

Docetism (DOH-suh-tiz-um)

Docetism, from the Greek dokein (“to seem”), is the belief that Christ’s body and suffering were appearance rather than flesh. The Gospel of Peter supplies the textbook line: “…he was silent as if having no pain.” (Akhmîm fragment, verses 10–14, tr. Mattison). Whether Peter is actually docetic is contested — Serapion of Antioch condemned it around 200 CE on roughly that charge, and modern readers are less sure.

Appears in: The Gospel of Peter · The talking cross

E

Ennoia (en-NOY-uh)

Ennoia is “Thought” — the first idea conceived within the divine, personified as a feminine power and often identified with Barbelo. In the Simonian myth Irenaeus reports, Simon Magus's companion Helena is this same Thought, fallen through the world and successively imprisoned in bodies. It is the earliest surviving version of the story every later gnostic system tells about Sophia.

Appears in: Simon Magus · Pleroma and the aeons

Epinoia (eh-pee-NOY-uh)

Epinoia is “Insight” — the luminous helper hidden inside Adam in Sethian myth, the faculty by which a person can recognize where they came from. She is sent down secretly, the archons cannot find her, and she is the reason the human creature turns out to be more than its makers. Insight, in this myth, is not something acquired from outside; it is contraband already installed.

Appears in: The Secret Book of John · What is gnosis?

G

Gnosis (NO-sis)

Gnosis is Greek for knowledge, but of the kind you get by acquaintance rather than by study — knowing a person, not knowing a fact. That distinction carries the whole system. What is known is not doctrine about God but one's own origin, and the knowing is itself the rescue — which is why these texts have no atonement theory and very little interest in belief.

Appears in: What is gnosis? · What is Gnosticism?

Gnostic

“Gnostic” comes from gnostikos, “given to knowledge,” and is the modern umbrella for second- and third-century Christian movements teaching salvation by revealed self-knowledge. The label is contested by the people who study it hardest: Michael Allen Williams argued in 1996 that “Gnosticism” lumps incompatible groups together, and Karen King argued in 2003 that the category was manufactured by heresy-hunters and inherited uncritically. Almost nobody in antiquity called themselves one.

Appears in: What is Gnosticism? · Gnostic vs. agnostic

H

Hebdomad (HEB-doh-mad)

The Hebdomad is “the seven” — the planetary heavens ruled by the archons, the Demiurge’s whole domain, ranked below the Ogdoad. Ancient astronomy supplies the map: seven wandering bodies, seven spheres, seven gates the ascending soul must pass. Gnostic writers did not invent the cosmology of their day; they gave it a warden on every floor.

Appears in: Archons · Pleroma and the aeons

Heresiology (heh-ree-see-OL-uh-jee)

Heresiology is the ancient genre of cataloguing and refuting heresies, and until 1945 it was almost the only evidence we had for what gnostics taught. Irenaeus's Against Heresies (c. 180), Hippolytus's Refutation, and Epiphanius's Panarion (c. 375) preserve their opponents by attacking them. Eusebius, in his Ecclesiastical History (c. 320), files the rival gospels among the writings pushed by heretics under apostolic names and judges them wicked and impious — and then, usefully, lists their titles.

Appears in: Who decided what went in the Bible? · Valentinus

Horos (HOR-os)

Horos means “Limit” and names the boundary power — also called Stauros, “Cross” — that fences the Pleroma and keeps Sophia’s passion outside it. In the Valentinian account the fullness needs an edge, or the error inside it would spread. The cross, in this reading, is not primarily an execution; it is the shape of a boundary, which is the sort of move that made heresiologists furious.

Appears in: Pleroma and the aeons · Sophia

Hylic (HY-lik)

A hylic is a person of matter — from hylē, “matter” — the lowest of the three natures in the Valentinian scheme of humanity. As the heresiologists report it, hylics cannot be saved because there is nothing in them that belongs elsewhere. Whether any Valentinian actually taught fixed classes of people, rather than describing three ways of living, is one of the live arguments in the field.

Appears in: Hylics, psychics, pneumatics

J

Jabal al-Tarif (JAB-al al-TAH-reef)

The Jabal al-Tarif is the honeycombed limestone cliff on the east bank of the Nile at whose base the sealed jar of codices was struck in December 1945. Its caves hold Sixth-Dynasty tombs; the farmer Muhammad Ali al-Samman was digging sabakh, soft nitrate-rich earth used as fertilizer, when his mattock hit the jar. The Pachomian monasteries stood within sight of the same cliff.

Appears in: The Nag Hammadi discovery · Why were the gnostic gospels buried?

K

Kenoma (keh-NO-muh)

Kenoma is “emptiness” — the region of deficiency outside the divine fullness, and the exact antonym of pleroma. Our world is in it. The pair is the whole Valentinian diagnosis in two words: reality is not divided into good and evil but into full and lacking, and what is wrong with matter is that something is missing from it.

Appears in: Pleroma and the aeons · The gnostic creation myth

L

Lacuna (luh-KYOO-nuh)

A lacuna is a hole in a manuscript — a place where the papyrus is torn, rotted or missing and the text simply stops. The plural is lacunae. In these editions they appear as brackets and ellipses, never as guesswork: the Gospel of Mary is missing pages 1–6 and 11–14, so its most important speech breaks off mid-vision and resumes elsewhere. Gaps are shown as gaps.

Appears in: The Gospel of Mary's missing pages · The Gospel of Mary · Sources & standards

Logia (LOH-ghee-uh)

Logia are “sayings” — a collection of remembered utterances with no narrative frame, which is exactly the form the Gospel of Thomas takes. When Grenfell and Hunt published their first Oxyrhynchus scrap in 1897 they titled it Logia Iēsou, sayings of Jesus, without knowing what book it came from. Forty-eight years later the Coptic Thomas showed up and answered them.

Appears in: The Gospel of Thomas · The Gospel of Q

Logos (LOH-gos)

Logos means word, reason and account all at once, and names the divine expression through which the unknowable source becomes sayable. Hermetic and Christian writers share the term. In Poimandres: “…the Light-Word (Logos) [that appeared] from Mind is Son of God.” (Corpus Hermeticum I, tr. G.R.S. Mead, 1906) — written independently of John's prologue, and startlingly close to it.

Appears in: Poimandres · Pleroma and the aeons

M

Mandaeans (man-DEE-unz)

The Mandaeans are the one gnostic community that never died out — an ethnoreligious people of Iraq and Iran who honor John the Baptist as their great teacher. They write in Mandaic, an Eastern Aramaic dialect, and their scriptures are their own, not Nag Hammadi's. War and displacement since 2003 have scattered a population that was already small, which makes them the answer to “do gnostics still exist” and an endangered one.

Appears in: The Mandaeans · Do gnostics still exist?

Manichaeism (man-ih-KEE-izm)

Manichaeism is the dualist world religion founded by Mani in third-century Mesopotamia, which spread from Roman Africa to China before being persecuted out of existence. Mani (c. 216–274 CE) built a scripture-producing church with a light-and-darkness myth close in temper to gnostic teaching. Augustine was a Manichaean hearer for nine years before he became its most effective opponent — which is how much of what we know survives.

Appears in: What is Gnosticism? · Gnosticism timeline

Marcionite (MAR-shun-ite)

A Marcionite followed Marcion of Sinope, who broke with the church at Rome in 144 CE, rejected the God of the Hebrew scriptures, and issued the first known fixed Christian canon. His list was short: an edited Luke and ten letters of Paul. Marcion is not a gnostic teacher in the strict sense — no Sophia, no divine spark, no myth of emanation — but his two-God theology forced the wider church to say what its own book was.

Appears in: Marcion · Who decided what went in the Bible?

Monad (MON-ad)

The Monad is “the One” — the single unknowable source from which everything proceeds, described almost entirely by what it is not. It is also called the invisible Spirit, the Depth and the Father. The crucial point, and the one popular accounts get backwards, is that the Monad is not the Demiurge: the creator of this world sits many levels below it and does not know it exists.

Appears in: The Monad · Pleroma and the aeons

N

Nag Hammadi (nag huh-MAH-dee)

Nag Hammadi is the town in Upper Egypt near which, in December 1945, a farmer struck a sealed clay jar holding thirteen leather-bound papyrus codices buried for roughly 1,600 years. The find is the largest recovery of lost Christian writing ever made: fifty-two tractates, among them gospels left out of the Bible. Not every gnostic text comes from it — Mary and Judas arrived by other roads — and saying so is the quickest way to tell a careful source from a careless one.

Appears in: The Nag Hammadi discovery · The complete Nag Hammadi list

Norea (nor-AY-uh)

Norea is the daughter of Eve in Sethian myth — the woman who refuses the archons, burns Noah’s ark when she is shut out of it, and is rescued by the angel Eleleth. Her short book, the Thought of Norea, is NHC IX,2, and she appears at length in the Reality of the Rulers (NHC II,4). Neither is in this library yet; both are worth knowing about, because she is the one figure in the myth who fights back and wins.

Appears in: Archons · Sethian vs. Valentinian

Nous (noose)

Nous is “Mind” — the divine intellect, treated in Hermetic and gnostic texts as a person who can be met rather than a faculty you possess. Poimandres opens with exactly that meeting: “I am Man-Shepherd, Mind of all-masterhood…” (Corpus Hermeticum I, tr. G.R.S. Mead, 1906). The revelation that follows is not information delivered but Mind recognizing itself in the one asking.

Appears in: Poimandres · The Monad

O

Ogdoad (OG-doh-ad)

The Ogdoad is “the eight” — in Valentinian teaching the first eight aeons of the fullness, and in other systems the sphere above the seven planetary heavens. The second sense is the one that matters for the soul's journey: pass the seven archon-ruled spheres and the eighth is where Sophia waits. Numbers do heavy theological work in these texts, and eight is the number of getting out.

Appears in: Pleroma and the aeons · Sophia

Ophite (OFF-ite)

Ophite, from ophis (“snake”), is a heresiologists’ label for groups said to honor the serpent of Eden as the first bringer of knowledge. Origen, answering the pagan critic Celsus, describes an Ophite diagram he had seen himself, mapping the archons sphere by sphere. No group we can name used the label of itself, and the reading it points at — the serpent tells the truth in Genesis 3 — is genuinely there in Sethian texts.

Appears in: The gnostic creation myth · Archons

P

P.Oxy. (pee-OKS-ee)

P.Oxy. is the siglum for the Oxyrhynchus papyri, the vast Egyptian rubbish-mound archive excavated from 1896, which yielded Greek fragments of the Gospel of Thomas. P.Oxy. 1, 654 and 655 were published as unidentified sayings of Jesus between 1897 and 1904 and only recognized as Thomas after the Coptic copy appeared in 1945. They are also the reason we know Thomas circulated in Greek in Egypt by about 200 CE.

Appears in: The Gospel of Thomas · When was Thomas written?

Papyrus (puh-PY-rus)

Papyrus is writing material made by pressing crossed strips cut from the pith of a Nile reed, and it is what every text in this library was first written on. It survives only where it stays dry, which is why the story of lost Christian literature is so disproportionately an Egyptian story. What was written in damp Syria or Rome on the same material is simply gone.

Appears in: The Nag Hammadi discovery · Sources & standards

Pistis (PIS-tis)

Pistis means faith or trust, and in the title Pistis Sophia it names Wisdom herself — “Faith-Wisdom,” the fallen aeon whose repentances the book recounts. The work survives in the Askew Codex, a fourth-century Coptic book acquired by the British Museum in 1785 and now British Library Add. MS 5114 — which means Europe had a long gnostic scripture on a shelf for 160 years before Nag Hammadi.

Appears in: Pistis Sophia · Pistis Sophia summary

Pleroma (pleh-ROH-muh)

The Pleroma is the “fullness” — the divine world of aeons, complete in itself, from which this world is a falling-away rather than a product. The Gospel of Truth uses the word as its destination: “This is the Word of the Gospel of the discovery of the fullness…” (NHC I 34–36, tr. Mattison). Salvation, in this vocabulary, is not forgiveness but restoration to a place that was never damaged.

Appears in: Pleroma and the aeons · The Gospel of Truth

Pneumatic (noo-MAT-ik)

A pneumatic is a person of spirit — from pneuma, “spirit” — in whom the divine spark is awake, the highest of the three natures. Irenaeus complains that Valentinians placed themselves in this class by definition, which is a fair complaint about any system that grades people. Read more sympathetically, pneumatic describes a condition that can arrive, not a caste you are born into.

Appears in: Hylics, psychics, pneumatics · What is gnosis?

Protennoia (pro-ten-NOY-uh)

Protennoia is “First Thought,” the divine voice who descends three times — as Voice, Speech and Word — in the tractate Trimorphic Protennoia (NHC XIII,1). She speaks in the first person throughout, in the same “I am” register as Thunder, Perfect Mind, and overlaps heavily with Barbelo. The text's closeness to John's prologue has kept a small industry of scholars arguing about which way the influence ran.

Appears in: Thunder, Perfect Mind · The Secret Book of John

Psychic (SY-kik)

A psychic, from psychē (“soul”), is the middle nature: capable of choosing, capable of faith, but not carrying the spirit that returns to the fullness on its own. In the Valentinian scheme this is where ordinary church Christians were placed — not condemned, but capped, allowed a middle rest short of the Pleroma. It is easy to see why bishops found the compliment insulting.

Appears in: Hylics, psychics, pneumatics · What do gnostics believe?

Q

Q (Quelle) (KVEL-uh)

Q is the hypothetical sayings source — German Quelle, “source” — that Matthew and Luke are thought to share where Mark has nothing. No copy has ever been found; Q is reconstructed from agreement between two gospels. Thomas matters to the argument because it proves a sayings gospel without a passion story is a form that actually existed, and Mark Goodacre and others still think Q is unnecessary.

Appears in: The Gospel of Q · Does the Gospel of Q exist?

S

Saklas (SAK-lus)

Saklas means “fool” in Aramaic and is one of the three names of the creator in Sethian texts, alongside Yaldabaoth and Samael. The Gospel of Judas keeps them as separate figures in the same scene: “And another angel, Saklas, came from the cloud too.” (Codex Tchacos 47–55, tr. Mattison). It is Saklas, in that text, who makes Adam and Eve — the fool, not the Father.

Appears in: The Gospel of Judas · Yaldabaoth

Samael (SAM-ay-el)

Samael is the third name of the gnostic creator, glossed in the Sethian texts as the blind god. The three names are a character sketch: Yaldabaoth the strange one, Saklas the fool, Samael the blind. In later Jewish tradition Samael becomes an angel of death, which is one of several reasons people ask whether this figure is Satan. He is not — the answer is a long no.

Appears in: Yaldabaoth · Is Yaldabaoth Satan?

Sethian (SEE-thee-un)

Sethian is the modern label for the older of the two great gnostic families, named for Seth, third son of Adam, whose spiritual offspring its texts claim to be. Its signature furniture: the invisible Spirit, Barbelo, the four luminaries, Yaldabaoth, and a rewritten Genesis. The Secret Book of John is its charter document, and roughly a dozen Nag Hammadi tractates belong to the family.

Appears in: Sethian vs. Valentinian · The Secret Book of John

Sophia (so-FEE-uh)

Sophia is “Wisdom,” the youngest aeon, whose solitary act of longing produces the Demiurge and so sets the whole disaster of the material world going. She is not a villain. The myth's most careful move is to make the origin of the world an error inside God rather than a rebellion against God, and to make the same figure who caused it the one who keeps working to undo it.

Appears in: Sophia · The gnostic creation myth

Syzygy (SIZ-uh-jee)

A syzygy is a yoked male–female pair of aeons, the basic unit of the Valentinian fullness, where nothing divine exists alone. Sophia's catastrophe is precisely a breach of this rule: she conceives without her partner. Thunder, Perfect Mind states the principle from inside — “I am the bride and the bridegroom…” (NHC VI,2, tr. The Gnostic Library).

Appears in: Pleroma and the aeons · Thunder, Perfect Mind

T

Tractate (TRAK-tayt)

A tractate is an individual work inside a codex — the neutral word scholars use so they don’t have to call everything a gospel. It is what the second number in a citation means: NHC II,2 is the second tractate of Nag Hammadi Codex II, which is Thomas. The thirteen codices hold fifty-two tractates, about forty-six of them distinct once duplicate copies are set aside, and most are treatises rather than gospels.

Appears in: The complete Nag Hammadi list · How many gnostic gospels are there?

V

Valentinian (val-en-TIN-ee-un)

Valentinian describes the school of Valentinus, the Alexandrian teacher who worked in Rome around 140 CE and produced the most sophisticated system the early church ever had to argue with. Tertullian claims he expected to be made bishop and turned bitter when he was passed over — a hostile story, told a generation later. His pupil Heracleon wrote the first known commentary on the Gospel of John, and the Gospel of Truth may be his own work.

Appears in: Valentinus · Sethian vs. Valentinian

Y

Yaldabaoth (yal-duh-BAY-oth)

Yaldabaoth is the blind creator god of gnostic myth — born of Sophia’s solitary thought, ruler of this world, convinced there is no god above him. The Gospel of Judas names him in a crowd of powers: “His name was Nebro, which means 'Rebel.' Others call him Yaldabaoth.” (Codex Tchacos 47–55, tr. Mattison). The name is usually derived from Aramaic for something like “child of chaos,” though the etymology is disputed.

Appears in: Yaldabaoth · Is Yaldabaoth Satan?

Where to go next

A glossary is a map, not a country. If you want the story these words belong to, read the gnostic creation myth straight through, then the two schools that told it differently. If you want the sources, every text in the library is free to read and named down to the manuscript and the translator, with selections labeled as selections and damage shown as damage; our sources and standards page explains why we use public-domain translations and show gaps as gaps. If you arrived with a question rather than a word, the Questions hub answers it in the first paragraph, and the Learn hub holds the longer guides.