LITERATURE OF GNOSTIC WISDOM 167
praise in a single voice. These dramatic scenes present both biblical and gnos-
tic figures: first of all the divine father and great invisible spirit, the divine
aeon incorruptibility, and the divine child, with the heavenly luminaries, par-
ticularly Eleleth; next Adam and Eve in the garden, with a gnostic serpent and
the rapacious rulers of this world; then Eve's children, including Norea, who
battles the rulers; and finally Zoe (life), daughter of Sophia, who battles and
punishes the demiurge himself.
As in the Secret Book of John, the arrogant ruler decides to create a mate-
rial earth and fashion a human in the image of the high god, made from the
earth. He does so, but the human is merely material and lies on the ground, in-
capable of rising. So the demiurge breathes life into him, but then he is only
psychical, animated with a worldly soul from the world ruler. Finally the spirit
comes to live in Adam, and he is able to rise. After he is placed in the garden
and put to sleep, woman is taken from his side. She is spiritual (endowed with
pneuma) and wakes him, saying, "Arise, Adam." When he sees her, he says,
"You have given me life. You will be called 'mother of the living.'"
Then darkness enters. Dazzled by Eve's beauty, the rulers lust for her and
try to rape her and sow seed in her. They pursue her, and like Daphne she
turns into a tree, leaving a shadow of herself, which they rape foully. Here the
text has assumed the Greco-Roman myth of Daphne and Apollo, with a new
twist. Then the snake—which, in a remarkable revision of the Genesis ac-
count, is called the instructor, because it knows and teaches about knowl-
edge—urges Eve to eat the fruit and obtain knowledge, whereupon begin the
Genesis problems of shame, banishment, exile, and mortality.
The character who emerges as a new gnostic hero is Norea, Eve's virgin
daughter. She successfully confronts both Noah and the rulers of darkness. She
asks Noah to let her enter his ark, and when he refuses, she burns it. Norea
(here also called Orea, perhaps "beautiful") thus assumes independence and
great powers. When the rulers find her and desire her, she defies them and
curses the arrogant god himself for his lechery, claiming her descent from the
world above. She turns to the god of all to rescue her, and he sends down
Eleleth, the great angel and luminary from the heavens. At her request he tells
her about the world above, separated by a veil from the realms below. And so
the narration moves to an accounting of the apocalyptic space of the gods.
This narration fuses Jewish biblical, hellenistic, Christian, and gnostic
tales. The garden story resembles the rape of Eve by the rulers in the text On
the Origin of the World. However, in the latter treatise the garden scene
is more elaborately developed and central to the document. It also differs in