The Thunder, Perfect Mind

The Thunder, Perfect Mind is a striking Gnostic poem spoken in the first person by a female divine voice who declares herself in a cascade of paradoxes: "I am the first and the last… the whore and the holy one… the silence and the word."

The revelation collapses every opposition by which the mind divides reality, presenting the sacred as that which contains and transcends all contraries. It is less doctrine than an initiatory utterance meant to break the hearer's habitual categories.

Among the most poetically arresting of the Nag Hammadi texts, it gives voice to a nondual divine consciousness in which knower and known, high and low, are one.