Pistis Sophia

The Third Document may perhaps be called without fear of contradiction “Part of the Books of the Saviour,” because it bears that title both at its head and at its foot. It begins by an exhortation to the disciples to preach “to the whole world” a series of ἀποτάγματα or renunciations of sin which may be connected with Jesus’ speech to Andrew at the end of the Second Document. It should be noted, however, that while in the Second Document mankind is to be entreated to renounce the world and its matter so that they may “go unto the Light,” the author of this Document presses them to abjure sin lest they suffer the torments of hell. These torments are also dealt with in considerable detail, and we can gather from the description that there are four Places of Punishment called respectively Amente, Chaos, the Middle Way, and the Outer Darkness.[29] This seems to be a sort of amalgam of different traditional beliefs, for while Amente appears in the Book of the Dead, Chaos in the First Document does not seem to be thought of as necessarily a Place of Punishment, and we have seen Pistis Sophia speaking of it in the Second Document as “the world of men.” So, too, the location of these different hells shows some confusion of thought. Amente is probably in the West or beyond the earth as it is in the Book of the Dead, Chaos is either the earth itself or beneath it, while the Middle Way is, like the Place of Punishment in the Enochian literature, in the firmament or “below the Sphere.”

As for the Outer Darkness, its name shows it to be a relic of Pagan Egypt where it was held that beyond the confines of the earth, the air became so thick as to be actually tangible and concrete. Among the tormentors in these various hells we find Ariel, Pistis Sophia’s persecutor Ialdabaoth, one “Iakhthanabas the Merciless” and the Dragon of Outer Darkness who is depicted as a great serpent coiled round the world having his tail in his mouth and containing places of torment within him where ice and cold come to supplement the tortures of fire and smoke.

A great part of the Document is likewise taken up by the questions of Mary Magdalene and the other disciples, among whom John is the most insistent, as to the sinners to whom they shall give their mysteries and the effect which they will have on them. We who hear in this Document of a mystery or secret whereby the dead can be raised, the sick healed, and other wonders performed, although Jesus tells His disciples that this mystery belongs to the Archons or wicked Rulers of the Stars and is not to be used save for the purpose of establishing the faith throughout the world.[30] We also have much in this Document as to the soul or incorporeal part of man which the disciples are told consists of the Power, the Soul proper, the Spirit Counterfeit, and the Fate. Of these, the Power is the most worthy and causes the man to seek after the mysteries, and the soul is really the Life or Breath and is made either out of the ejecta of the Rulers or from the dregs or grosser parts of the Light which is at certain periods squeezed out of them by certain powers appointed for that purpose.

The Spirit Counterfeit, on the other hand, is the envelope or mask of the soul which constantly leads it to commit sin and bears witness after death to its having done so, while the Fate is the death to which the man is predestined, and which he can never escape while uninitiate.[31] Incidentally, too, we hear a good deal in this Document as to the Gnostic belief in the transmigration of souls, reincarnation being obligatory on such souls as have not found the more sublime mysteries.[32] Several formulas are also given whereby the soul can cut itself loose from the Spirit Counterfeit and the Fate, and we are told that even an uninitiated person can escape from the torments of the Dragon of Outer Darkness if one of the names of the reptile be said by or for him. Throughout this Document the tortures of the different hells and the beast-shaped demons who administer them are much dwelt upon. Finally, Jesus tells His disciples that He came to earth to bring these mysteries, and that had He not done so neither Patriarchs nor Prophets would have entered into the Light.[33]

The opening sentence of the Fourth Document shows plainly that it comes from a book written independently of the preceding ones and not as their continuation. It ignores completely the tradition held in the time of the Antonines by orthodox and heretic alike, that Jesus spent many years on earth after the Resurrection,[34] and announces that after He “rose from among the dead the third day,” His disciples gathered round Him reminding Him that they had left the whole world to follow Him.[35] Then begins a scene that reminds one irresistibly of the magical practices rife during the first three centuries of our Era, some details of which have come down to us in the Philosophumena and in the different Magic Papyri to be found in the Museums of Paris, London, Leyden, and Berlin. Jesus, standing by an altar by the side of the sea “Ocean,” makes invocation to His Father in words which are not gibberish, as at first sight they appear to be, but a jumble of Hebrew, Egyptian, and perhaps Persian words copied and re-copied by scribes ignorant of these languages until they are all but unrecognisable. He calls upon the name of the Father of the Treasurehouse of Light, whereupon the heavens open revealing the “true shapes” of the sun and moon, and Jesus and His disciples are uplifted to “the Middle Way which is below the Sphere.”

Here the arrangement of the stars is explained to them and they learn that the rebellious Rulers who persisted in copulation were bound to the Sphere to the number of 1800 for each sign of the Zodiac, under the rule of 360 of that number, who are themselves under the sway of the five Planets, Saturn, Mars, Mercury, Venus, and Jupiter. Yet the author of this Document must have known, although he varies, the tradition of the First Document, for Jesus tells His hearers that these planets were strengthened by the infusion into Saturn of a Power from the Great Unseen God who projected Pistis Sophia, into Mars of a similar Power from one of the three Triple-powered Gods, into Mercury of one from another of the Triple Powers, and into Venus of one from “Pistis Sophia the daughter of Barbelo”[36]; while one from the “Little Sabaoth the Good,” a Power of higher rank than these last, who in the story of Pistis Sophia proper is described as supplying the Power which takes the place of Jesus’ own earthly soul, is cast into the planet Jupiter and is given rule over all the others. All these planets are given barbarous names in addition to their Greek ones, as are the Great Unseen God and the two Triple Powers, these last names appearing also in the Magic Papyri, while the names of both planets and Powers appear to have a real meaning.

Jesus then shows to His disciples the five torture-chambers of the Middle Way, each of them presided over by an “Authority,” who with his (or her) assistants has been chosen from among the rebellious Rulers. Each of these Authorities sees to the punishment of particular sins, which sins his or her ministers have “entered into man” and caused him to commit. Three of these presiding demons are females, one of them being the triple-faced Hecate still famous in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, and among them we find the merciless Iakhthanabas already mentioned in the Third Document, and the Egyptian God Typhon. The different terms of punishment from 150 years downwards which sinful souls will suffer in these tortures of the Middle Way are all given, and it is expressly said that these places of torment will be dissolved when the two beneficent planets, Venus and Jupiter, come into certain positions in the Zodiac.[37] These Places are, it would seem, actually shown to the disciples, Jesus thereby in part fulfilling the promise made in the First Document to lead them through all the heavenly Places. He then restores the heavens to their normal condition, and returns with the disciples to the “Mountain of Galilee,” where he celebrates for them a sacrament with “fire and water, wine and blood.”

The distribution of bread also forms part of this sacrament, and it is accompanied by a “sign” which we know from other sources was the conversion of one of the cups of wine into the water of baptism.[38] This “mystery” or sacrament is said to have the effect of remitting all the sins of the disciples, and they are told to perform the same ceremony for all those who will listen to their preaching. They remind Him that there are other Baptisms of Fire and the Holy Spirit of Light respectively, and He tells them that these are more excellent than any Mystery save only those of the Seven Sounds and of the Great Name of God, which if spoken to any demon will destroy him with all his tortures. He is apparently about to perform these for the benefit of the disciples when the Document abruptly ends with the gap left by the tearing-away of the four pages already noticed.

It must be noted that nearly all the first part of this Document is full of invocations or prayers couched in the apparent gibberish before mentioned, that “Mary”—whether the Mother of Jesus or the Magdalene is not stated—asks one question only, that the planet Venus is called “Bubastis,” Egyptian, Greek, and Hebrew magic and astrology being present in nearly every line, while there is some little trace of Persian influence as well. It is also closely connected with one of the documents of the Bruce Papyrus, where the peculiar sacrament here celebrated by Jesus is described on similar lines and is followed by the celebration of the other already mentioned; while in another Document of the same Papyrus the name of Pistis Sophia is given in connection with a place of repentance. The story of the Samaritan woman and of the spear thrust at the Crucifixion is also mentioned in this Fourth Document, these being the first unmistakable quotations from the Fourth Gospel to be found in our text.

The Fifth Document is, as has been said above, the shortest of all, and has lost its title in the gap of four leaves in the British Museum MS. It is entirely concerned with the punishments assigned to different sins; and as sedition, lust, and robbery with violence appear in the Fourth Document as sins punishable in the Middle Way, but are not mentioned in the present fragment, we may presume that they were dealt with in the part lacking, and probably occupied at least three of the missing pages. But the Baptism of Fire and the Holy Spirit which Jesus is going to celebrate when the lacuna occurs, if treated at the same length as in the Bruce Papyrus, can hardly have taken up less than the other five missing pages, and it is therefore plain that nothing in addition to these punishments can have occupied the missing beginning of this Document. After this the Fifth Document begins with a broken sentence containing the punishment of the man who curses, and then goes on to describe the punishment of the evil speaker, the murderer, the habitual thief, the proud man, the blasphemer, the sodomite, and the celebrant of the filthy parody of the Eucharist known as the Black Mass.[39] In one or other of those cases, the four hells of Amente, Chaos, the Middle Way, and the Outer Darkness are introduced, the punishments in them being successive, and we read again here the names of Ariel and Ialdabaoth who are mentioned in the Third Document, as those of torturers in Amente and Chaos respectively.

So, too, we hear again of the cup of forgetfulness which in the Third Document is administered to the soul after it has been shown the punishments in order that it may profit nothing on reincarnation by its knowledge of their terrors. But here the punishments are so different from those formerly described that we see at once we are dealing with a different author. The sum total of the periods of punishment for cursing which are administered in all the different hells does not amount to more than four years as against the 133 assigned to it in the Fourth Document; and the penalty for slander is here given as no more than 30 years as against the same period of 133. The Receiver of Sabaoth Adamas, leader of the rebellious Rulers, now administers the cup of oblivion instead of as in the Third Document, the “Rulers of the head of the Æons,” and he is given the name of Ialuham, while the Receivers of Ariel, who are here mentioned for the first time in our text, are named Abiuth and Kharmon. The case of the uninitiated but righteous dead is also dealt with in answer to a question from John, but in a different manner from its treatment in the Third Document, as here the soul on coming out of the body is met by the Receivers of Bainkhookh or the planet Mercury, while the cup which takes away the baleful effect of the cup of oblivion is administered by a Receiver of the planet Jupiter[40].

It is also to be noted that in this Document for the first time the division of mankind into “righteous” and “wicked” bodies, which find or do not find, as the case may be, the mysteries of light, is made to depend entirely on the periodic disposition of the stars. When, it is said, the two beneficent planets Jupiter and Venus come before the Virgin of Light and the two maleficent Saturn and Mars behind her in the revolution of the Sphere, all the souls sent into the world will be good, and when the position is reversed, all will be wicked.[41] Here, too, for the first time, we are told that the form of the body on reincarnation depends on the sins committed by the soul in its last life,—that the soul of the proud man will be put into a body dumb and deformed, the soul of the thief into one lame and maimed and blind—and so on.

It will therefore be seen that this Document is sufficiently connected with some of the preceding ones to warrant the supposition that it comes from the same school or sect, although it is noteworthy that neither in our Fourth nor our Fifth Document are the Ineffable One or the First Mystery ever referred to. The chief point in common between this Fifth Document and the Bruce Papyrus is the mention of the Black Mass which appears in both Documents. A feature peculiar to this Document alone is the open reference to the Pagan Gods as fiends; and besides Typhon and Hecate, who have in truth a more or less malevolent character in the later Egyptian and Greek mythology, Adonis, one of the forms under which Osiris was worshipped at Alexandria, is made to take the soul of the thief to Amente, while “the high goddess” of Homer, Persephone, the much-loved daughter of the Eleusinian Demeter, figures as one of the tormentors in Chaos. The sentence about the journeys of the Apostles written on the blank leaf bound in with the rest of the volume has no perceptible connection with our text and may possibly be the work of some one who, suddenly coming across it in some other document and wishing to preserve it, seized upon this leaf as the only piece of parchment available.

To sum up then: the MS. contains five principal documents together with a fragment which may or may not once have formed part of one of them. All are imperfect and are extracts from longer and possibly more coherent writings. Two of them—the Pistis Sophia proper, and our Fourth Document—can be clearly distinguished as written by different authors, and the same can be said with nearly as much certainty with regard to the Third and Fifth. Yet the book from which the tale of Pistis Sophia was extracted must have been old enough to have gone through more than one recension, as is shown by the number of alternative readings duly noted in the MS. There are also in the details of the same story, blunders or contradictions which go to show that the translator or scribe had more than one MS. to work from; and these may have differed as much as do, for instance, the two versions of the (Coptic) Book of the Resurrection attributed to St. Bartholomew and published by M. Lacau and Sir Ernest Wallis Budge from the MSS. in the Bibliothèque Nationale and the British Museum respectively. This is the view taken by the German commentators on our text; but they are by no means in accord upon it, and it therefore does not seem necessary to do more here than refer to it.