LITERATURE OF GNOSTIC WISDOM 117
Troy, for example—until he found and delivered her. Simon Magus is paro-
died as nothing but a cheap magician in the New Testament Acts of the Apos-
tles 8 as well as the apocryphal Acts of Peter, which is the basis for the film
The Silver Chalice.
The Song of the Pearl is part of the apocryphal Acts of Thomas, a Syrian
text. In the Acts of Thomas the messenger Judas Thomas is described as praying
and meditating in an Indian prison, and there he writes the Song of the Pearl
as a poem on the soul. The poem relates a quest for a pearl, sleep and forget-
fulness while on the quest, and a call to remembrance. The speaker recites:
I remembered that I was a son of kings
and my free soul longed for its own kind.
I remembered the pearl
for which I was sent down into Egypt,
and I began to enchant
the terrible and snorting serpent.
I charmed him into sleep
by calling the name of my father over him
and of my mother, the queen of the east.
I seized the pearl
and turned to carry it to my father.So ends, in enlightened discovery, the quest of the traveler, the quest of the
soul. The traveler and the soul have sought and have found.ADDITIONAL LITERATURE
OF GNOSTIC WISDOM
Several additional texts, which seem to represent gnostic religious options but
which cannot be classified along with Sethian, Valentinian, or Thomas and
Syrian literature with any confidence, are included in this part of the volume.
The Exegesis on the Soul, like the Song of the Pearl, narrates the story of the
career of the soul, but the Exegesis on the Soul stresses the seductive nature of
the body and sexuality in its account of the fall of the soul, and the liberation
of the soul from the filthiness of bodily corruption in its account of the
restoration of the soul. The gnostic text On the Origin of the World resembles
the Reality of the Rulers in a number of ways, and it contains themes that
recall Sethian, Valentinian, Manichaean, and other religious traditions. The