The Apocryphon of John

The Apocryphon (Secret Book) of John is the fullest surviving statement of Sethian Gnostic myth, framed as a revelation given to John by the risen Christ. It unfolds an elaborate cosmology in which the true God, the unknowable Monad, overflows into a fullness of luminous aeons.

Disaster enters when the aeon Sophia acts without her consort and bears the Demiurge, an ignorant creator-god who fashions the material world and imprisons sparks of divine light in human bodies. Salvation is gnosis: the awakening remembrance of one's origin above this flawed creation.

Recovered among the Nag Hammadi codices, it is the central text for understanding the Gnostic conviction that the world is a mistake and the self a captive fragment of the divine, redeemed by knowledge rather than faith.