794 EPILOGUE
in Jewish Merkabah Mysticism and Talmudic Tradition and the mysterious
"Fourth Gospel" of John. The prologue of the book of John, "In the beginning
was the word," gave gnostics a concordance with Genesis, the philosopher's
logos, and platonic light. The Sethian texts carried on the Essene "antithesis of
light and darkness, truth and lie, a dualism that ultimately went back to Per-
sian dualism."^28 Of this turbulent and creative moment, where heterodoxy
and disappointment seemed everywhere, Robert M. Grant wrote about a self-
centered religion: "In the period when gnosticism arose, apocalyptic-minded
Jews might have sought signs of the creator's power and his intervention on
their behalf; philosophically minded Greeks might have looked for speculative
wisdom, more or less rational in nature; but the gnostic preached himself and
his true spiritual origin, both of which he had come to know by revelation."^29
So after the late first century through at least the fourteenth and fifteenth
centuries, in Northern Africa and virtually all of Europe, and from Asian
Syria to Chinese Turkestan, gnostics were writing books of spiritual search
and illumination that made self-knowledge a virtue rather than a sin. In the
Origin of the World, Eve herself is not the servant of a devil snake who leads
her to original sin. Rather, she is the primal heroine of self-knowledge. She
also ceases to be a mere rib taken from Adam but his creator. By breathing
spirit into the mouth of an inert clay figure of Adam on the ground, she gives
life to the first man. As for the conniving snake, he is no longer a disguised
devil but a luminous god who helps Eve snatch gnosis from the demiurge. In
freeing Eve from shame and abuse, the gnostics—alone among major faiths—
made woman an equal.
REVIVAL IN THE WORKS OF DISSIDENT
PHILOSOPHERS AND POETSAfter its centuries of flourishing growth and then its virtual obliteration,
gnosticism in the West found its true revival in the works of dissident poets,
playwrights, philosophers, alchemists, and scientists. Traces of gnostic knowl-
edge was basic to intellectual history. The Swiss physician and alchemist
Paracelsus (i493?-i54i) was the first modern doctor of chemical medicines
and was also a student of gnostic thought. As an alchemist he sought to purify
and transform nature's elements, freeing them of their low level of matter, so
that nature in its purest forms could be used for curing the body and mind. In
- Ibid., 7.
- Grant, Gnosticism and Early Christianity, 38.