Pistis Sophia

Pistis Sophia: A Gnostic Gospel

The first English translation of the Gnostic religious document that was the most influ­ential of all Gnostic studies before the dis­covery of the Nag Hammadi library.

The Pistis Sophia is a gnostic text thought to have been written sometime between the 3^rd and 4^th centuries AD. According to Mead, there were two codices discovered in the late 18^th century that contained the original work. The Bruce Codex was brought to Oxford by the famous Scottish traveler Bruce in 1769, and the Askew Codex was given to the British Museum by the heirs of a wealthy doctor in 1785. Both codices were thereafter translated by experts and their contents ordered in a fashion that seemed proper according to their best abilities. Mead’s translation followed these efforts, but as he says in his introduction, the order of the contents was changed “to place the contents of these Coptic translations roughly in such a sequence that the reader may be led from lower to higher grades of the Gnosis.”

The Pistis Sophia itself is of such a marvelous and complex nature, that it is hard to describe in a short space. But generally, the book shows the risen Jesus revealing the lower and higher mysteries to a group of his followers over the period of 22 years. Included in these mysteries are complex cosmologies that the human soul must travel through in order to reach Gnosis with the Father. A new story of the rise and fall of a restorative figure known as the Pistis Sophia is also given by Christ.

Contents:

• Documents & General Literature of Gnosticism
• Probable History of the Treatise
• Jesus Hitherto Instructeth His Disciples Only up to the Region of the First Mystery
• Treasure of Light
• Confusion of the Powers & the Great Earthquake
• Dismay of the Disciples
• Jesus Addresseth Them
• That John Was Elias in a Former Birth
• Mystery of the Five Words on the Vesture
• Sophia & Her Fellow-Powers Behold the Light

About the Author

George Robert Stow Mead (1863 to 1933) Hermeticist and scholar was one of the truly great researchers into arcane wisdom. At a time when the esoteric tended to mean little more than table tapping and mysterious phenomena, he was translating into English the gems of Neoplatonic and Egyptian philosophy. In works such as Thrice Greatest Hermes, The Doctrine of the Subtle Body, Orpheus, and Fragments of a Faith Forgotten, he almost single handedly reassembled the lost esoteric tradition of classical Athens and Alexandria and Gnosticism in general.