190 LITERATURE OF GNOSTIC WISDOMProtennoia, first thought, is female. But she lives in the light, who is the fa-
ther of all, and in her is also the divine child, the son of god. So the book be-
gins, "I am first thought, the thought that is in light. I am movement that is in
all, she in whom the realm of all takes its stand." The figures and attributes
manifest a complex variety from the very first statements of the text. First
thought is also the eternal being of Barbelo. As a woman and female principle
she evokes Sophia, wisdom in her earlier descent with all her creation. She also
corresponds to the son in the form of the logos, the savior. This mingled
scheme of references, ecstatically uttered, and its continued mingling, from
the very first lines of Jewish, gnostic, and Christian elements, leads John
Turner to state,
Trimorphic Protennoia has undergone at least three states of
composition. First, there was the original triad of the aretalogi-
cal self-predications ["I am" statements] of Protennoia as Voice,
Speech, and Word that were probably built up out of the Jewish
wisdom tradition and maybe out of The Apocryphon of John's
similar Pronoia aretalogy itself sometime during the first cen-
tury C.E.; there is little here that seems specifically gnostic or
Christian or Sethian or Barbeloite. Second, this was supple-
mented ... by various narrative doctrinal passages based upon
traditional Barbeloite theogonical materials [about the emer-
gence of the divine realm] After circulation as a mildly Chris-
tian Barbeloite text in this form, the third and last stage of
composition seems to have involved a deliberately polemical in-
corporation of Christian, specifically Johannine Christian, ma-
terials into the aretalogical portion of the third subtractate.^1Initially, the voice of first thought descends as a light force into darkness
and shapes the fallen in their world of error and mortality. They have experi-
enced the destructions brought on by the chief creator of the earth (who is
the demiurge, called variously Sakla, Samael, and Yaldabaoth). The victims of
the creator listen to the mother, who offers the mystery hidden from the
eternal beings, which is embedded in the formation of language itself. She
tells them,
i. In Robinson, ed., NagHammadi Library in English, pp. 512-13.