y66 EPILOGUE
temporal body; and (2) a transcendent principle of light that may be found
during one's lifetime, in a flash of gnosis, bringing divinity into one's solitude.
In gnosticism, salvation, as the flash of gnosis, may be achieved now and
not only as a reward after death, as in Christianity. Christian salvation—un-
seeable, untestifiable, unexperienced by humans—is uniquely associated with
an afterlife. Its elusive nature gave rise to those great organized clergies who
claimed possession of a knowledge of salvation through their interpretation
of scripture that usually they alone could read. The gnostic can go it alone,
without clergy, and arrive now. In this sense the pervasive ideas of Plato and
the neoplatonists, who offer us metaphors and allegories of immediate mysti-
cal salvation, seems to be the common stuff that links all the diverse eruptions
of gnosticism.
Gnosis, meaning "knowledge," becomes the quest of those competing
sects, deriving from diverse sources, who have been called the gnostics. When,
through Plato, Socrates declares, "Know yourself,"^1 one tenet of gnosticism
was born. But much earlier, in the Hebrew Bible, Eve chose the fruit of gnosis
from the tree and is treated thereafter—as is woman—as the flawed, outsider
heretic in the Judeo-Christian-Islamic family of religions. Conversely, among
the gnostics she is praised for her courage to choose knowledge rather than
innocence (ignorance) and to defy the authority of the creator god of earth
and people, who guards knowledge as his own. Eve is the hero of the light and
the Promethean liberator from god's tyrannical authority. In Genesis and in
later gnostic myth (such as the Origin of the World and the Reality of the
Rulers), Eve is the mythical mother of gnosticism.
In Mesopotamia and along the Mediterranean, all the way from Alexan-
dria to Rome, from about 200 BCE to 200 CE, we witness a rich ferment of
spiritual movements, all seeking answers to the enigmas of existence. This is
the intertestamental period, in which appear most of the noncanonical apoc-
rypha and pseudepigrapha, the Dead Sea Scrolls of the Essenes and the Cor-
pus Hermeticum of Egypt. In this period of the mystery religion, messianic
charismatic, philosopher, theologian, and mystic also fashioned those sys-
tems of wisdom sayings, doctrines, and myth, often recorded on scrolls, that
have been classified as gnostic scripture. But until the twentieth century this
gnostic scripture survived only as disparate fragments in Greek, Latin, Syriac,
- This is also the admonition inscribed on the temple of the Delphic Oracle, according to
Plutarch.