790 EPILOGUE
In the latter, the romping creator god holds dominion over Eden as he chases
and rapes the virgin Eve, who represents courage, defiance, and knowledge; as
a result of an abominable gang rape by the creator god and his angelic aids,
Eve begets generations of trapped demigod souls, who are our ancestors. But
after the fiercely discrediting deeds by the demiurge, the mountains of the first
father will blaze and fire will turn on its maker, who will burn inside the
forests. Then "light will cover darkness." There are constants to these wild tales
that slip in allegorically or emerge in plain description: a radical and alien
stance to traditional creed; a mystical encounter with invisible spirit; and a
flight from initial ignorance and darkness to silent freedom and light.
Other tales fare less well in transcription. Confusion is inevitable with so
many schools, conflicting symbolism, and variation of a mythic story. Con-
sider the common theme of the fall and enslavement of the soul in the body's
prison and its longing for return to its source. What is that holy source? It has
a babel of names: the androgynous god of light, god the father/god the
mother, the Sethian unknowable god, the Valentinian father of truth, the
Manichaean original light, the abyss of nonbeing that in Basilides means the
demiurge. Often there is a mishmash of hierarchical names, titles, and ab-
stractions, where the author appears seduced by the glory of language to the
detriment of meaning (and delight of scholars) as in a fascinating scripture
called the Foreigner (Allogenes in Greek and Coptic).
In this adventure the foreigner goes off on a platonic journey and ascent to
salvation. He is aided by divine figures who generate other crucial helpers: the
aeon of Barbelo and her triadic emanation of Kalyptos, Protophanes, and Au-
togenes. They prepare him with wings of internal ascent for the coming vi-
sions when his liberated soul will merge joyfully with the unknowable god of
light. The Foreigner is a complex tale of metaphysical acrobatics and meta-re-
alities, a far cry from the apocalyptic journey in Revelation with its beasts
from the sea, splashes of angels, and jeweled decorations of heaven. Deprived
of the high rhetoric of Revelation or Daniel, this flight to joyful extinction fal-
ters in turgid overload of abstract exclamations. The worthy thought is not al-
ways matched by dramatic means.
Here it is appropriate to acknowledge the terminological problems in
reading gnostic texts, complicated not only by the diversity of sects but the
multiple ways these terms are translated into English and other languages.
Mandaean texts demand a glossary of terms just to decipher the main figures
and concepts, beginning with Anosh or Enosh for "man" and Kushta for
"truth." Perhaps this diversity is inevitable and right for a religion that fed on