9

The Vision or

the Foreigner

T

he Foreigner (or Allogenes) is another Sethian text of gnostic wis-

dom, of which the Vision is a part. In this text Allogenes the for-

eigner has a visionary experience of the divine, and at the end of

the text (not included here) it is said that he writes it down in the document

for his child Messos. The neoplatonist author Porphyry maintains that Ploti-

nos opposed gnostics who used revelations by Allogenes and Messos, among

others, and the present text may be one of the works referred to by Porphyry.

The role of Allogenes as foreigner or one from another race suggests that the

visionary protagonist of this text may be Seth—described in Genesis as "an-

other seed" in place of the dead Abel—or a follower of Seth, or every person,

every gnostic who follows the enlightened way of Sethian knowledge.

In the section of the text translated here, the foreigner has a vision of the

divine that recalls the Secret Book of John and other Sethian literature. Earlier

in the text the foreigner has been instructed in the proper method of medita-

tion, and now the foreigner employs this method in the visionary experience.

The visionary experience is understood not as an ascent upward through

stages of enlightenment but rather as an inner experience of deeper and

deeper insight. The foreigner thus envisions within self aspects of the divine,

in silence, as a part of the inner journey.

But the revelatory vision of god within is hardly the end of the experience.

The nature of the divine is explained, in more philosophical terms, by the