Andrew Phillip Smith - A Dictionary of Gnosticism

A DICTIONARY OF GNOSTICISM

A DICTIONARY OF GNOSTICISM

Andrew Phillip Smith

Theosophical Publishing House

Wheaton, Illinois * Chennai, India

Learn more about Andrew Phillip Smith and his work at www.andrewphillipsmith.com Find more books like this at www.questbooks.net

Copyright 2009 by Andrew Phillip Smith

First Quest Edition 2009

Quest Books

Theosophical Publishing House

PO Box 270

Wheaton, IL 60187-0270

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Cover image: Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Dantis Amor, 1860. Tate, London/Art Resource, NY.

Cover design by Kirsten Hansen Pott

Flavia Sophe Epitaph @ Bardic Press 2009, used with permission.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Smith, Andrew Phillip.

A dictionary of Gnosticism / Andrew Phillip Smith.1st Quest ed.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN 978-0-8356-0869-5

1. GnosticismDictionaries. I. Title.

BT1390.S545 2009

273.103dc22 2009019793

ISBN for electronic edition, mobi format: 978-0-8356-3097-9

6 5 4 3 2 * 09 10 11 12 13 14

Contents

Acknowledgments

My gratitude to all the scholars, academic and lay, who transcribed, translated, elucidated, analysed and revealed the scriptures and history of Gnosticism. I would like to thank my editors at Quest: Sharron Dorr; Richard Smoley, especially for his steady hand at the tiller; and Will Marsh, whose fact-checking and suggestions went way beyond the remit of a copy editor. Also to my wife Tessa, son Dylan, and my parents, Gill and Bryan, in whose house in Wales I began work on the dictionary, in transit between California and Ireland.

Introduction

Gnosis is direct spiritual experience, knowledge of the divine without intermediary or any controlling authority. Those who practiced it in the ancient world were known as Gnostics, and the web of historical individuals and movements, systems, and teachings that are linked to these ancient Gnostics is Gnosticism. Ancient Gnosticism has a high degree of spiritual relevance for the contemporary seeker. Aspects of the Gnostic worldview, such as alienation from society, distrust of religious authority, creative mythmaking, and direct personal spiritual experience, echo in the hearts of modern spiritual seekers. Though there have been many forms of mystical or esoteric Christianity (or inner Christianity, to use the helpful term proposed by Richard Smoley), the Gnostics are particularly notable because of their prominent position in the early history of Christianity.

In its broadest form, the Gnostic myth states that we humans are stranded in matter and yet each of us has a spark of divinity within, which can be fanned into a fire through which we can each partake of the nature of the true and highest God. These themes have resurfaced in modern movies and books like The Matrix, The Truman Show, and Philip Pullmans His Dark Materials trilogy. Millions of copies of the Nag Hammadi librarytwelve Gnostic codices discovered in Egypt in 1945have been sold, and the recently published Gospel of Judas has been the subject of a media circus, appearing in newspapers, magazines, and television documentaries and spawning a cottage industry of scholarly and popular books.

Yet anyone who flips open a Gnostic text, whether casually or with the intention of serious study for a spiritual or scholarly purpose, or even reads a popular book on Gnosticism, is confronted by a wide range of obscure terminology, a bewildering array of neologisms, untranslated Greek terms, barbarous words, and specialist academic jargon. The world of Gnostic mythology is populated by dozens of archons and aeons, each with some obscure name, and a demiurge called Yaldabaoth (or Ialdabaoth or some other spellings) or Saklas or Samael. There are hylics, choics, psychics, and pneumatics, a pleroma and a kenoma. Wisdom is often called Sophia, but why is she sometimes Achamoth, and is that the same as Achmoth, Echmoth, Echamoth, Chokmah, or Hokhmah? The titles of the Gnostic books are rendered inconsistentlyis the Apocryphon of John the same as the Secret Book of John, or is that the Secret Revelation of John? And what about the Apocryphon of James? Is that the same as the Apocalypse of James, and is that the First Apocalypse of James or the Second Apocalypse of James? What is an apocryphon, and which James is this, anyway? (To answer a couple of these questions, the Apocryphon of John, the Secret Book of John, and the Secret Revelation of John are all different titles for a single text. The James titles refer to three different texts.)

Gnostic texts are complex entities, often written in layers, our surviving texts being based on earlier texts. The hostile accounts of the heresy-hunting church fathers like Irenaeus and Hippolytus have often played on these complexities and emphasized the philosophical jargon and multilingual names in their efforts to discredit the Gnostics. Modern scholars have had to choose whether to leave Gnostic terms in their untranslated Greek forms or to find an English equivalent, and they have been far from consistent in their choices. In addition, terminology from the study of the New Testament and early Christianityexegesis, recensions, eschatology, Urtexts, sitz-in-leben, pseudepigrapha, dominical sayings, and so onhas wormed its way into the available books on the Gnostics.

Similar problems hold true for the historical successors, predecessors, and cousins of the ancient Gnostics, like the Manichaeans, Mandaeans, Cathars, and Hermetists, each of which is essential to understanding Gnosticism. Yet, more than two hundred years after the Western rediscovery of original Gnostic texts such as Pistis Sophia and the Books of Jeu, no dictionary of Gnosticism has been available, no reliable basic guide to assist the beginning student, whether at graduate level or for spiritual study. A Dictionary of Gnosticism aims to correct this problem, to fill the deficiency, as the Gnostics would have it.

Until the discovery of the Nag Hammadi library, we had only the hostile accounts of the early church fathers along with a few original texts that represented a late stage of Gnosticism and in any case had not received enough scholarly attention. It was in December 1945 that the Nag Hammadi codices were discovered. Mohammed Ali es-Samman and his brother Khalifah Ali, two Arab camel drivers, were out looking for fertilizer at the bottom of the high chalk cliff of Djebel-el-Tarif. They found a large earthenware jar, which they smashed open, slightly wary of what they might find, only to discover twelve books. (One of the books had another pamphlet bound into it, so the books are now numbered as being thirteen in total.) These are codices, not scrolls. Scrolls are continuous sheets rolled up rather like rolls of wallpaper, but a codex is a manuscript book copied by hand before the invention of printing but bound in essentially the same way as the modern book. The pages of the codices are made from papyrus cut into sheets and bound between leather covers that have a clasp extending from the back to the front, making the codices resemble modern briefcases. All of the Nag Hammadi codices are written in the Coptic language, which is the final form of the ancient Egyptian language, by which stage it was written in Greek letters instead of hieroglyphs or demotic script, with a few extra letters to represent sounds lacking in the Greek language. As far as we know the original language of every text in the collection was Greek.