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Liber IX · Gnosticism

Liber IX · Gnosticism · Chapter VIII: Nag Hammadi Texts

Pistis Sophia and the Askew Codex: A Gnostic Text Rediscovered

Pistis Sophia and the Askew Codex: the Coptic Gnostic book bought by the British Museum in 1785, its story of Sophia's repentance, and its modern readers.

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The Pistis Sophia is a long Gnostic dialogue in Coptic in which the risen Jesus teaches his disciples about the heavens, the fall and rescue of the divine figure Pistis Sophia ("Faith-Wisdom") and the mysteries that save the soul. It survives in a single parchment manuscript, the Askew Codex, which the British Museum acquired in 1785 from the heirs of the London physician Anthony Askew. Until the Nag Hammadi discovery of 1945 it was one of the very few original Gnostic books anyone could read.

What the Askew Codex Contains§

The Askew Codex is a parchment volume written in Sahidic Coptic, the literary dialect of Christian Upper Egypt. Palaeographers usually date the hand to the fourth century, although some argue for a later date. Like the Nag Hammadi books it is a translation: its many Greek loanwords suggest an original composed in Greek, probably in Egypt in the second half of the third century.

The manuscript falls into four sections, conventionally Books I to IV. The first three form one continuous work; the fourth is a separate, simpler treatise that most scholars since Carl Schmidt have judged to be older. A heading inside the manuscript speaks of "the second book of Pistis Sophia," and the name has been applied to the whole codex ever since. Schmidt noted that a scribal phrase, "a portion of the books of the Saviour," may describe the contents better, since Sophia's story fills only part of the work.

The codex preserves post-resurrection dialogues in which Jesus explains a vast, ranked cosmos of aeons, rulers and powers of light; the Sophia of Gnostic myth appears here inside a far more elaborate system.

From Anthony Askew to the British Museum in 1785§

Anthony Askew (1722–1774) was a physician, classical scholar and one of the great book collectors of eighteenth-century London. How he obtained the Coptic codex is not recorded. After his death his library was dispersed, and in 1785 the British Museum bought the codex from his heirs. It is now in the British Library as Additional MS 5114.

The Coptic scholar Carl Gottfried Woide, working in London, studied and transcribed it, and his reports made scholars aware that a genuine Gnostic writing had survived. Early readers, guided by the church fathers' heresy catalogues, tended to attribute it to Valentinus. That attribution has not survived modern study.

The full text appeared only in 1851, when Julius Heinrich Petermann published the Coptic with the Latin translation of Moritz Gotthilf Schwartze, who had died in 1848. Together with the Books of Jeu in the Bruce Codex, the Pistis Sophia then formed the core of what Europe knew of Gnosticism from Gnostic hands rather than from its opponents, as the overview of the Nag Hammadi library explains.

The Narrative: Jesus Returns and Pistis Sophia Falls§

The work opens with an unusual claim. After rising from the dead, Jesus spent eleven years teaching his disciples, but only the lower mysteries. Then, on the Mount of Olives on the fifteenth of the Egyptian month Tybi, at the full moon, a great power of light descends on him. He ascends through the heavens and returns the next day to report what he has done.

On his ascent he took away a third of the rulers' power and changed the direction in which their spheres turn. The consequence is striking: those who cast horoscopes and consult fate will no longer read the heavens correctly, because the saviour has deliberately disturbed the old order of the stars.

In the thirteenth aeon Jesus finds Pistis Sophia in distress, and the central story unfolds. Sophia had longed for the true Light. The arrogant ruler Authades ("Self-willed") sent a lion-faced power whose false light she mistook for the Light above; she descended towards it into the chaos, where his emanations surrounded her and drained her light. From the depths she sings thirteen songs of repentance (metanoiai), each a lament and a plea for rescue, until Jesus leads her out and restores her.

The story echoes the older myth of Sophia's fall in Sethian Gnosticism and Valentinian texts, but shifts the emphasis. Sophia here is less the cause of the material world than a model of the soul: deceived, imprisoned and saved through repentance.

Mary Magdalene, the Disciples and the Odes of Solomon§

After each repentance Jesus asks his disciples to explain it, and they answer by quoting a psalm or another song that matches it.

The most prominent of them is Mary Magdalene. She asks far more questions than anyone else, and Jesus praises her repeatedly. Peter protests that she leaves no room for the men; Mary answers that she fears Peter because he is hostile to women, and Jesus defends her right to speak. The same tension appears in the Gospel of Mary and the Gospel of Thomas, and scholars such as Karen King and Antti Marjanen have used the Pistis Sophia in reconstructing early debates about women's authority. Martha, Salome and Mary the mother of Jesus also speak, while Philip, Thomas and Matthew are appointed as the three witnesses who must write down Jesus's words.

The songs cited include five of the Odes of Solomon, an early Christian hymnbook probably of the second century. For a long time these Coptic quotations were almost the only known text of the Odes. When J. Rendel Harris identified a Syriac manuscript of the collection in 1909, the Pistis Sophia became a valuable second witness, and the first Ode is still known only from its Coptic quotation.

Mysteries, Punishments and the Dragon of Outer Darkness§

The later parts turn from myth to salvation. Jesus has brought the "mysteries" of light, rites and secret names that forgive sins and let the soul pass the rulers after death, and the text insists they should be offered even to great sinners who repent.

Book III describes the fate of souls. Each person is accompanied by a "counterfeit spirit" (antimimon pneuma) that draws the soul towards sin. At death the soul is examined, punished according to its deeds and given a draught of forgetfulness before being sent into a new body. Lists of sins are matched with punishments and with the number of rebirths required, ideas the text shares in outline with Platonic and Manichaean thought (see Manichaeism and Mandaeism).

Book IV is the most ritual in tone. Jesus faces the four directions and calls on divine names in strings of vowels and syllables comparable to those of the Greek and Coptic magical papyri. He describes the "way of the midst", where rulers with names partly drawn from Greek and Egyptian religion, among them a three-faced Hekate, torment souls. Beyond lies the outer darkness: a great dragon with its tail in its mouth, holding twelve dungeons, each ruled by an animal-faced power, an image akin to the Hellenistic ouroboros.

1785 in Context: Coptic, Egypt and Etteilla's Book of Thoth§

The purchase of the Askew Codex coincided with a peak of European fascination with Egypt. Hieroglyphs could not yet be read; Champollion would decipher them only in 1822, with the help of Coptic. Since Athanasius Kircher, Coptic had been recognised as the last stage of Egyptian, so a Coptic Gnostic book seemed a window on Egyptian wisdom too.

The same longing shaped Paris. In 1781 Antoine Court de Gébelin announced in Le Monde primitif that the tarot was the surviving "Book of Thoth" of the Egyptian priests. The cartomancer Jean-Baptiste Alliette, who wrote as Etteilla (1738–1791), took up the idea at once: between 1783 and 1785 he issued a treatise in instalments on fortune-telling with tarot cards, later founded a society of interpreters of the Book of Thoth and designed, around 1789, what is generally regarded as the first tarot pack made for divination. The story is told in the history of tarot.

The two events are unrelated in origin: one concerns a real ancient manuscript, the other a modern invention presented as ancient. Yet both belong to the moment when Europeans began looking to Egypt and to "secret" books for a primal wisdom.

Editions, Theosophists and Modern Readers§

Émile Amélineau published a French translation in 1895, and Carl Schmidt produced the influential German translation of 1905 and a Coptic edition in 1925; George Horner's English version followed in 1924. The standard edition today is Schmidt's text with Violet MacDermot's English translation (1978).

Popular fame came through Theosophy. G. R. S. Mead, secretary to Helena Blavatsky, translated the work into English; it appeared first in the journal Lucifer, partly with Blavatsky's notes, and as a book in 1896, revised in 1921. C. G. Jung cited it in his studies of Gnostic and alchemical symbolism, and the Colombian teacher Samael Aun Weor later wrote a long commentary on it for his Gnostic movement.

Modern scholars read it more soberly, as a late, learned product of Egyptian Christian Gnosticism, connected with the Books of Jeu, which it mentions, and with the groups Epiphanius called "Gnostics." It remains essential for seeing how Gnostic myth, ritual and ethics developed after the classic systems described in What Is Gnosticism?.

Frequently asked questions§

What is the Pistis Sophia?§

It is a Coptic Gnostic dialogue in which the risen Jesus teaches his disciples about the heavens, the fall and rescue of the aeon Pistis Sophia and the mysteries that save the soul. It was probably composed in Greek in Egypt in the third century.

Why is it called the Askew Codex?§

The manuscript is named after Anthony Askew (1722–1774), the London physician and collector who owned it. The British Museum acquired it from his heirs in 1785, and it is now in the British Library.

Is the Pistis Sophia part of the Nag Hammadi library?§

No. It was known long before the 1945 discovery and comes from a different manuscript, though it is studied alongside the Nag Hammadi texts and the Bruce Codex as part of the surviving Coptic Gnostic literature.

Only date and atmosphere. The codex entered the British Museum in 1785 while Etteilla was publishing his first treatise on tarot divination in Paris, and both reflect the period's fascination with Egypt and hidden ancient wisdom.

Sources and further reading§