LITERATURE OF GNOSTIC WISDOM 225revealer, whose greatness is incomprehensible and whose being
is unfathomable.^2Thunder is a universal poem, a shout that is at once unique and yet has
parallels in world literature ancient and modern. Commentators on Thunder
have looked to Sanskrit, Egyptian, and Jewish religious literature to find
equivalents for its pervasive use of oxymoron, antithesis, and paradox. How-
ever, it is not necessary to confine oneself to religious sources for precedents,
since these rhetorical tropes are standard in classical and later literature, and
their enunciation in the terms we still use today was established by Greek
grammarians in hellenistic Alexandria on the basis of examples drawn from
Greek poetry, from Sappho to Pindar. The author of Thunder wrote in Greek,
and his poem follows the prosody of Greek verse. As an obscure imitator of
Greek and Hebrew expression, the author reproduced the forms and breath
of Pindar and the verbal elan of the biblical prophets.
Thunder is a strange book whose voice is that of a powerful, confessional
Sophia figure who takes on the world with extraordinary vigor and piercing
candor. She is not an aloof prophet or a cloistered sibyl, but an assertive
woman engaged in all strata of human society. In the course of Thunder, the
woman relentlessly contradicts herself: "What you see outdoors you see
within you," or "I am speech undecipherable," or "I am below and they come
up to me." And she shows no remorse for her dissenting ways. Although the
author's sex is unknown, the female voice in the text speaks for herself, and as
such is an early instance of complete female empowerment, without apology
or compromise. She speaks a metaphysical tour de force, a sermon singing
the self in which the woman is the universal paradigm. Her presence adds ev-
idence to Elaine Pagels's persuasive assertion of women's freer role in gnosti-
cism, which she documents in The Gnostic Gospels. What can be said with
certainty is that the woman of Thunder represents a great woman's voice in
antiquity.
The woman in Thunder prepares her "interior bread and mind." She has
no shame in being seen anywhere provided that she follows her spiritual con-
victions, even if "cast down on the earth" and "lying on animal dung." She
sternly abuses and demeans herself yet affirms herself. She is the disgraced and
- In Robinson, ed., The Nag Hammadi Library in English, ist ed., p. 271.