The Gnostic Religion

“What matters for the progress of the myth is the fact common to all versions that the godhead, to meet the aggressor, had to produce a special "creation" representing his own self... in response to the ensuing fate of this divine hypostasis the further multiplication of divine figures out of the supreme source comes about. This is the general gnostic principle of emanation...”

“Here is one simple criterion for what is "Christian" (orthodox) or "gnostic" (heretical): whether the guilt is Adam's or the Archon's, whether human or divine, whether arising in or before creation.”

“[C]osmos is said to be the "shape" (schema) of "Deficiency"; Deficiency we could equate with the "Oblivion"... Oblivion in turn is there related to "Error" (planē) and its formation (plasma), this in turn to "Anguish" and "Terror," they again to "Ignorance"—and so the whole chain of apparently psychological and human concepts, through which the mysterious tale moves, has almost by accident its cosmic meaning authenticated...”

“"[T]he speculative principle of ...the "pneumatic equation"—namely: that the human-individual event of tic knowledge is the inverse equivalent of the pre-cosmic universal event of divine ignorance...”

“In the Mandaean literature, it is a standing phrase: life has been thrown into the world, light into darkness, the soul into the body. ...Ejected into the world, life is a kind of trajectory projecting itself forward into the future.”

“In the Gnostic formula it is understood that, though thrown into temporality, we had an origin in eternity, and so also we have an aim in eternity.”

“This second edition... had been enlarged by two substantial additions: a new chapter... dealing with the great find at Nag Hamadi in Egypt... and... an essay... "Gnosticism, Nihilism, and Existentialism."”