Archons are the subordinate cosmic rulers in Gnostic cosmology, created by the Demiurge to govern the material world and its planetary spheres. In Gnostic teaching, they obstruct the soul's ascent to the divine Pleroma. The primary sources are two Sethian texts from the Nag Hammadi library: the Hypostasis of the Archons and On the Origin of the World.
- The word "archon" is Greek for "ruler" or "lord." In Gnostic cosmology, Archons are the planetary wardens of the material order, subordinate to the Demiurge.
- Ialdabaoth, the chief Archon in Sethian texts, boasts "I am a jealous God and there is no other God but me," a direct citation of Exodus that Gnostics read as proof of divine ignorance rather than divine authority.
- Seven Archons typically govern the seven planetary spheres. The soul must pass through each sphere after death, and gnosis provides the knowledge needed for that passage.
- The Hypostasis of the Archons and On the Origin of the World are the two Nag Hammadi texts devoted entirely to the Archon mythology, both from a Sethian Gnostic background.
- John Lash's modern reinterpretation of Archons as active psychic threats is intellectually provocative but stands apart from the scholarly consensus, which reads Archons as mythological figures within ancient cosmological systems.
What Are Archons?
The word "archon" comes from the Greek archon, meaning "ruler," "lord," or "one who governs." In classical Greek politics, an archon was a magistrate, a civic administrator with authority over public affairs. In Gnostic cosmology, the term was repurposed to describe something far more troubling: the subordinate rulers of the material world, beings created by the Demiurge to administer the physical cosmos and, in doing so, to keep humanity's divine spark imprisoned within matter.
To understand the Archons, one first needs to understand the broader Gnostic picture. As detailed in our introduction to Gnosticism, Gnostic systems generally posit a sharp division between the true divine reality (the Pleroma, or "fullness") and the material world, which is understood as a flawed or even hostile creation. The bridge between them is the Demiurge, a lesser divine being who fashioned the physical cosmos not out of malice alone, but out of ignorance of the higher reality above him. We cover the Sophia myth and the Demiurge's origin at length in our companion article on Sophia in Gnosticism, so this article focuses on what the Demiurge created beneath himself: the Archons.
In most Gnostic accounts, the Archons are not entirely independent entities. They are extensions of the Demiurge's imperfect creative act, beings who reflect and maintain the limitations of the material order. Their role as cosmic wardens is twofold: they uphold the structure of the physical world (each governing a planetary sphere), and they obstruct the soul's return to the Pleroma, sometimes through ignorance and sometimes through active hostility. The specific character of that hostility depends on the Gnostic school, a distinction explored in detail below.
This is not merely ancient mythology for its own sake. The Archon concept addresses a question that appears across many wisdom traditions: why does the world seem to resist human flourishing? Why do ignorance, fear, and compulsion seem so structurally embedded in human experience? The Gnostic answer is that the world was built that way, administered by beings whose nature is limitation itself.
Primary Sources: Archons in the Nag Hammadi Texts
The discovery of the Nag Hammadi library in 1945 gave scholars access to Gnostic primary sources that had been lost for over a millennium. Among the 52 tractates in that collection, two are dedicated specifically to the Archon mythology: the Hypostasis of the Archons (NHC II,4) and On the Origin of the World (NHC II,5 and XIII,2). Both texts come from a Sethian Gnostic background, meaning they belong to the tradition that placed the biblical Seth, third son of Adam and Eve, at the center of a sacred lineage carrying the divine spark through human history.
The Hypostasis of the Archons takes its name from a Greek phrase meaning "the reality of the rulers," or, in some translations, "the nature of the archons." It opens with a citation from Paul's letter to the Ephesians (6:12), which speaks of wrestling "against the rulers of the darkness of this world," and then proceeds to retell the opening chapters of Genesis from a Gnostic standpoint. The Archons appear not as servants of a benevolent creator but as blind, boastful rulers who mistake themselves for the highest power in existence.
On the Origin of the World is a longer, more composite text that draws on Jewish, Greek, and Egyptian sources alongside Gnostic mythology. It describes the creation of the world by the Demiurge and his Archons in considerable detail, including the names and attributes of individual Archon rulers. Together, these two texts provide the most concentrated ancient account of what the Archons are, what they do, and why they matter to the Gnostic understanding of human existence.
Other Nag Hammadi texts, including the Apocryphon of John and the Gospel of the Egyptians, also describe Archon hierarchies in detail, but it is the Hypostasis and On the Origin of the World that Gnostic studies typically treat as the primary Archon documents. The broader Nag Hammadi collection, including the Gnostic Gospels, situates this mythology within a rich web of cosmological and ethical reflection.
Ialdabaoth: The Chief Archon
At the head of the Archon hierarchy in Sethian Gnostic texts stands Ialdabaoth (also spelled Yaldabaoth or Ialtabaoth). He is simultaneously the Demiurge who created the material world and the chief Archon who rules it. His character is one of the most striking figures in all of ancient religious literature: a being of real creative power who is nonetheless profoundly ignorant of the larger reality from which he came.
The derivation of the name "Ialdabaoth" has been disputed by scholars for generations. Some trace it to Aramaic roots combining words for "child" and "chaos" or "darkness," yielding something like "child of chaos." Others see in it a corrupted or coded form of a divine name, perhaps related to the Hebrew Sabaoth (meaning "hosts" or "armies," a title of the God of Israel). Still others read it as a deliberate distortion meant to mark this being as a lesser counterfeit of the true divine. No scholarly consensus has fully settled the question, and the ambiguity itself may be intentional, since Gnostic authors often encoded layers of meaning in their naming conventions.
What is unambiguous is the theological claim Gnostic texts make through Ialdabaoth's most famous utterance. In the Apocryphon of John and related Sethian texts, Ialdabaoth declares: "I am a jealous God and there is no other God but me." Anyone familiar with the Hebrew Bible will recognize the echo immediately: this is a paraphrase of Exodus 20:5 and Deuteronomy 5:9, part of the Mosaic covenant's declaration that the God of Israel tolerates no rivals. For the Gnostic authors who wrote these texts, this boast was not evidence of divine majesty. It was evidence of divine ignorance. A truly supreme being would have nothing to be jealous of. The very act of declaring "there is no other God but me" implied, for Gnostic readers, that there was in fact a higher God that Ialdabaoth did not know about.
This reading of the Old Testament was one of Gnosticism's most radical theological moves. It did not reject scripture, it reread it. The God of Moses, in this framework, was not the highest divine reality but a subordinate creator with limited vision who had mistaken himself for the absolute. For a deeper look at how this intersects with early Christian debates, our article on Gnostic Christianity explores the full theological stakes.
The Seven Archons and the Planetary Spheres
Below Ialdabaoth in most Gnostic systems stand seven subordinate Archons, each governing one of the seven classical planetary spheres: Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, the Sun, Venus, Mercury, and the Moon. This sevenfold structure was not invented by Gnostics. It drew on deeply rooted Hellenistic cosmology, which imagined the cosmos as a series of concentric shells surrounding the earth, with each planetary sphere exercising its own influence on human life below. What the Gnostics added was a theological valuation: these spheres are not merely natural zones of influence, they are administered by limited beings whose governance reflects their limitations.
The names of the seven Archons vary considerably between Gnostic schools and texts. In the Apocryphon of John, one of the most detailed catalogues, they carry names such as Athoth, Harmas, Galila, Yobel, Adonaiou, Cain, and Abel (the last two borrowing the names of Adam's sons for cosmic rulers, a characteristic Gnostic inversion). Other texts give different names, and the Valentinian school, discussed below, had its own nomenclature. What remains consistent across sources is the structural claim: seven rulers, seven spheres, and a correspondence between the cosmic order and the conditions of human embodied life.
Some later Gnostic-adjacent traditions drew a further correspondence between the seven Archons and the seven deadly sins. Pride, envy, wrath, sloth, avarice, gluttony, and lust were mapped onto the seven planetary rulers, suggesting that the compulsions that bind human beings to lower behavior are not merely moral failures but cosmological forces, built into the fabric of material existence by its ruling powers. This is a later interpretive development rather than a consistent feature of early Gnostic texts, but it illustrates how the Archon framework was extended to address the full range of human psychology.
The connection between planetary symbolism and inner states also has resonances in other esoteric traditions. At Thalira, we find it productive to read the Archon-sphere map alongside the Kabbalistic Tree of Life, which similarly organizes the cosmos into emanating levels of being, each with its own qualities and limitations. These traditions are not identical, but their shared interest in mapping the structure of reality onto the structure of consciousness makes them useful conversation partners.
Archons and the Human Soul
The Gnostic account of the human being is more complicated than a simple body-soul dualism. Most Gnostic systems distinguish at minimum three aspects of the human person: the material body (hyle), the psychic element (psyche), and the spiritual spark (pneuma). It is the pneuma, the divine spark, that is genuinely of divine origin, a fragment of the Pleroma that somehow became embedded in material existence. The Archons, in this account, are the agents who administer that embeddedness.
According to texts like the Apocryphon of John, the Archons participated in the fashioning of the human body, each contributing their portion of the material constitution. The result was a being that carries within it a divine element (pneuma) that the Archons cannot fully control or comprehend, and a material-psychic structure that remains subject to their governance. This is why, in Gnostic thought, human beings are simultaneously enslaved and potentially free: enslaved by the Archon-shaped conditions of material existence, but carrying within them something the Archons did not make and cannot reach.
The soul's situation after death is equally shaped by the Archon framework. When a person dies without gnosis, the soul must pass through the seven planetary spheres on its way back toward the Pleroma. At each sphere, the Archon of that level interrogates the soul and attempts to retain it, either returning it to reincarnation or stripping away aspects of its divine inheritance. This is why some Gnostic initiation traditions provided adepts with sumbola, secret passwords and formulae, to be spoken at each sphere so that the Archon would be compelled to let the soul pass. Passages in the First Apocalypse of James and related texts preserve examples of these formulae, giving us a rare window into the practical, initiatory dimension of Gnostic practice.
Gnosis itself, self-knowledge in the deepest sense, is what liberates the soul from this cycle. When a person comes to know their true nature as a divine spark, they recognize the Archons' authority as fundamentally illegitimate. That recognition does not immediately dissolve material existence, but it changes the soul's relationship to it fundamentally. The Gospel of Thomas touches on this liberating self-knowledge in several of its logia, even without using the Archon vocabulary directly.
The Hypostasis of the Archons: A Close Reading
The Hypostasis of the Archons (NHC II,4) is a Sethian Gnostic text likely composed in Egypt sometime in the second or third century CE. Its full title translates as "the reality (or nature) of the rulers." The text is relatively short, fewer than 20 pages in modern editions, but densely mythological.
The text opens by citing Ephesians 6:12, anchoring its project in the Pauline language of cosmic struggle against invisible powers. It then retells Genesis from the creation through the flood, but with the standard roles inverted: the Archons are the "gods" of Genesis, the serpent in the garden carries the voice of a higher spiritual power, and Eve is not the cause of the Fall but a vehicle for divine wisdom descending into matter.
The most striking episode is the Archons' assault on Eve (or her spiritual counterpart). When the Archons attempt to possess the spiritual Eve, she escapes into a tree, leaving only her shadow body behind. This narrative encodes the Gnostic conviction that the divine feminine principle (associated with the spirit) cannot be seized or violated by material powers, however great their force. Her daughter Norea, a figure not found in canonical Genesis, subsequently defies the Archons directly, refusing their authority and calling on the divine for protection. The angelic being Eleleth descends to assist her, explaining the nature of the Archons and the promise of liberation.
The Sethian background of the text is evident throughout: Seth's line carries the pneumatic inheritance that the Archons cannot extinguish, and the text ends with the assurance of a final age when the Archons' authority over human beings will come to an end.
The Hypostasis of the Archons rewards careful reading because it does something unusual even within Gnostic literature: it gives the Archons a quasi-sympathetic portraiture. They are not purely demonic. They are beings acting out of their nature, which is limitation and blindness. The Archon Samael, one of Ialdabaoth's subordinates, is described as "blind," not evil in a deliberate moral sense, but structurally incapable of perceiving the spiritual reality above himself.
This is theologically significant. The Gnostic critique of the material order is not primarily a critique of wickedness; it is a critique of ignorance. The Archons do what they do because they do not know any better. Human beings who remain unconscious of their divine origin are, in a sense, in the same position: maintaining conditions they mistake for the whole of reality.
The figure of Norea is one of the most distinctive contributions of this text to Gnostic literature. She is fiercely disobedient to Archon authority, insisting on her divine heritage against their claims, and her persistence calls forth divine intervention. In our reading, she functions as a model for the pneumatic human: someone who refuses to accept the Archons' account of reality as final.
Valentinian vs. Sethian Perspectives on the Archons
Not all Gnostics understood the Archons in the same way, and the differences are theologically important. The two main currents worth distinguishing are the Sethian and Valentinian schools, both of which produced substantial literature and both of which are well represented at Nag Hammadi.
Sethian Gnosticism, the background of the Hypostasis of the Archons and the Apocryphon of John, tends toward a sharper dualism. The Archons are actively hostile to the divine spark in humanity. Their creation of the material world is an act of imprisonment, and their governance of the planetary spheres is an ongoing obstruction of the soul's return to the Pleroma. Ialdabaoth's boastful declaration is not an innocent error in Sethian reading; it is an assertion of illegitimate sovereignty that the pneumatic human is called to resist and ultimately transcend.
Valentinian Gnosticism, associated with the second-century teacher Valentinus and his school, takes a somewhat different view. In Valentinian cosmology, the Demiurge and his Archons are imperfect but not malevolent. The Demiurge acts out of ignorance, not spite, and the Archons administer a flawed but not deliberately hostile world order. This distinction matters for Valentinian soteriology: if the Archons are ignorant rather than hostile, the path of liberation is more about illumination than resistance. Gnosis, in this reading, dispels the darkness without requiring a cosmic confrontation.
This difference in tone between Sethian and Valentinian accounts has practical implications for how Gnostic practice was understood. The Valentinian emphasis on illumination and the gradual education of the soul fits more easily with liturgical and communal religious practice, which may explain why Valentinian communities were able to operate within or alongside early Christian churches for a period. Sethian practice, with its sharper cosmic adversarialism, tends toward a more esoteric and initiatory model. Both tendencies are alive in contemporary esoteric spirituality, and understanding which you are working with matters for how you interpret the tradition.
For context on how these schools fit within the broader Gnostic Christian world, our article on Gnostic Christianity covers the social and theological setting of the early Gnostic communities.
John Lash and the Modern Archon Revival
The academic consensus on the Archons, as represented by scholars like Elaine Pagels (The Gnostic Gospels, 1979), Bentley Layton (The Gnostic Scriptures, 1987), Marvin Meyer (The Nag Hammadi Scriptures, 2007), and Karen King (The Secret Revelation of John, 2006), treats the Archons as mythological figures belonging to ancient cosmological and soteriological systems. In this scholarly reading, Archons are narrative devices for expressing the Gnostic conviction that the material world is a limited, imperfect order administered by limited, imperfect beings, and that human beings contain something that transcends that order.
Scholars in this tradition are careful to read Gnostic texts within their historical context: second- and third-century Egypt and Syria, in conversation with Platonic philosophy, Jewish apocalypticism, and early Christianity. They do not treat the Archons as literally real entities operating in the modern world. The value of Gnostic mythology, in the academic reading, lies in its psychological and philosophical depth, not in any claim to describe objective metaphysical entities.
This is an important baseline when engaging with contemporary popular reinterpretations. The ancient texts are rich enough to reward serious engagement on their own terms.
The most prominent modern reinterpretation of the Archons comes from John Lash, a comparative mythologist whose work on Metahistory.org and whose 2006 book Not in His Image: Gnostic Vision, Sacred Ecology, and the Future of Belief brought the Archon concept to a wide contemporary audience. Lash's reading of the Nag Hammadi texts, particularly the Apocryphon of John, led him to propose that the Archons should be understood not as mythological figures but as a genuine psychic or quasi-material intelligence that manipulates human consciousness and history.
In Lash's framework, the Archons are connected to specific astronomical phenomena (he identifies them with a class of entities associated with the solar system's formation) and are understood as actively influencing human civilization, particularly through religious and political institutions. He uses this framework to mount a wide-ranging critique of Abrahamic religion as a form of "Archontic" control over human imagination and ecological consciousness.
At Thalira, we find Lash's work genuinely interesting as a creative synthesis and as a provocation to rethink received religious assumptions. His close engagement with Nag Hammadi sources is more serious than much popular esoteric writing, and his ecological framing raises questions worth taking seriously. However, it is important to be clear: Lash's interpretation is a modern speculative construction, not the consensus of Gnostic scholarship, and it departs significantly from what the ancient texts themselves say. The Gnostic authors of the Hypostasis of the Archons were not writing about extraterrestrial intelligences or modern political control systems. They were working within a specific ancient cosmological framework shaped by Platonic philosophy, Jewish apocalypticism, and early Christian theological debate.
Treating Lash's work as ancient Gnostic teaching would be a category error. Reading it as a contemporary mythological experiment that draws creatively on ancient material is a more productive frame, and one that lets you engage with both the ancient sources and the modern interpretation on their own terms.
Overcoming the Archons: The Gnostic Path
The Archon framework, read at the level of consciousness rather than cosmology, describes something recognizable: the experience of being governed by forces that feel external and unchosen. Habit, fear, the pressure of social conformity, the compulsive repetition of inherited patterns. These function, in lived experience, much as the Archons function in Gnostic mythology. They administer a world that feels given, not chosen, and they obstruct movement toward something freer and more fully alive.
What makes the Gnostic account philosophically interesting is its insistence that there is something in human awareness that the Archons, by their nature, cannot reach. The pneumatic spark, the divine element in the human person, is not a product of the Archon-created material order. It comes from elsewhere, and the Archons' inability to fully possess or destroy it is woven into the Gnostic texts as a recurring assurance.
This is not a counsel of passivity or otherworldly withdrawal. It is a map of where genuine freedom is located. The Gnostic insight is that the conditions of material existence do not exhaust the possibilities of human awareness. Something in us exceeds the system that contains us, and gnosis is the recognition of that fact.
The Gnostic path, in its classical form, centered on gnosis: self-knowledge that is simultaneously knowledge of one's divine origin. This is not intellectual information about cosmological doctrines, though those doctrines serve as the symbolic framework. It is a direct recognition, what some Gnostic texts call an "awakening," of the pneumatic reality within oneself. The Gnostic redeemer figure, whether the Christ of Valentinian Christianity or the revealer figures of Sethian texts, functions primarily as the one who delivers this knowledge, not as a sacrificial savior in the orthodox Christian sense.
The soul's ascent through the planetary spheres after death is the eschatological dimension of this liberation. As the soul passes through each Archon's sphere, it sheds the conditioning layers associated with that planetary influence. Saturn's sphere might require releasing attachment to structure and control; the Moon's sphere might require releasing the emotional and instinctual patterns bound to material existence. The initiate who has received gnosis in life is prepared for these encounters; they know the Archons cannot legitimately claim authority over a pneumatic soul, and that knowledge is itself the key.
The sumbola, the passwords given to initiates, are one expression of this preparedness. In texts like the First Apocalypse of James, we find formulae that the soul is to pronounce at each Archon's gate: declarations of spiritual identity and origin that override the Archon's claim to jurisdiction. Whether these were literal ritual practices or primarily symbolic expressions of the gnosis principle is debated, but their presence in the texts suggests that Gnostic communities took the soul's post-mortem situation seriously as a practical concern, not only a theoretical one.
The Archon framework also has productive connections to other symbolic systems for understanding layered reality. The alchemical tradition, with its interest in purifying the self through successive stages of transformation, can be read as a parallel map of the same ascent: the soul working through the dross of conditioned existence to recover its essential nature. These are different languages for a shared question: what in us is free, and what obscures that freedom?
The seven planetary Archons can serve as a framework for examining the inner wardens that constrain your own awareness. Each planetary sphere, in the Gnostic scheme, corresponds to a quality of experience that can operate either as a prison or as a resource, depending on whether it is governed by limitation or illuminated by gnosis.
The practice: Take 15-20 minutes of quiet, uninterrupted time. Begin by settling your attention on your breath, letting the ordinary demands of the day recede.
Then bring to mind each of the following planetary forces as an inner question:
- Saturn (structure and limitation): Where in my life am I operating from fear of consequences rather than genuine understanding? What rules do I follow without knowing why?
- Jupiter (expansion and belief): What beliefs about what is possible for me are inherited rather than examined? What do I assume I cannot do or be?
- Mars (will and aggression): Where does my drive come from reactivity or wounded pride rather than genuine care? What am I fighting that I could release?
- Sun (identity and recognition): How much of my sense of self depends on external validation? What would remain if none of it were confirmed by others?
- Venus (attachment and desire): Which attachments are keeping me from seeing clearly? What am I unwilling to let go of?
- Mercury (thought and communication): Which mental patterns repeat without resolution? Which stories do I keep telling that no longer serve?
- Moon (instinct and habit): What habitual emotional reactions govern my daily experience before I have a chance to choose?
For each question, notice what arises without judgment. The Gnostic insight is not that these forces are evil, but that they become "archontic" when they operate unconsciously, claiming authority over your awareness without your knowing consent. Noticing them is the beginning of gnosis.
Close the practice by resting in a few moments of open attention, without any agenda. This quality of open, uncompelled awareness is what the Gnostic texts associate with the pneumatic element, the part of you that no Archon made and no Archon can fully claim.
The Archons are among the most intellectually demanding figures in ancient religious thought. They require us to hold in mind a cosmology in which the world is real, structured, and powerfully present, and yet not the final word on what human beings are or what they are capable of. The Gnostic authors who wrote the Hypostasis of the Archons, the Apocryphon of John, and the other Nag Hammadi texts were not pessimists. They were realists about the conditions of material existence, and optimists about the divine nature hidden within it.
The key move in the Archon framework is the distinction between what was made for you and what you are. The Archons fashioned the bodies, the instincts, the planetary conditions of embodied life. They did not make the pneumatic spark. That distinction, between the constructed self and the aware presence that observes it, is the heart of what Gnostic gnosis points toward, and it remains as relevant to a serious spiritual practice today as it was in second-century Alexandria.
At Thalira, we find that the most productive engagement with ancient Gnostic mythology is neither credulous acceptance of its cosmological claims nor dismissive reduction to mere historical curiosity. These texts were written by people who were thinking hard about consciousness, freedom, and the relationship between the divine and the human. Reading them with that seriousness, and letting them speak to your own experience, is how they come alive.
What are Archons in Gnosticism?
Archons are the subordinate rulers of the material world in Gnostic cosmology. Created by the Demiurge, they govern the planetary spheres and, according to Gnostic texts, obstruct the soul's return to the divine Pleroma. The word "archon" is Greek for "ruler" or "lord."
Who is Ialdabaoth?
Ialdabaoth is the chief Archon in Sethian Gnostic texts, often identified with the Demiurge who created the material world. Gnostic authors identified his boast "I am a jealous God and there is no other God but me" with the God of the Old Testament, arguing it revealed his ignorance of the higher divine reality above him.
What Nag Hammadi texts discuss the Archons?
The two primary Nag Hammadi texts dedicated to Archons are the Hypostasis of the Archons (also called the Reality of the Rulers) and On the Origin of the World. Both are Sethian texts that retell Genesis from a Gnostic perspective and are found in Codex II of the Nag Hammadi collection.
What are the seven Archons?
In most Gnostic accounts, seven Archons rule the seven planetary spheres: Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, the Sun, Venus, Mercury, and the Moon. The soul must pass through each sphere after death on its return to the Pleroma, and in some traditions initiates were given secret passwords to gain passage past each Archon's gate.
What does John Lash say about Archons?
John Lash, in his 2006 book Not in His Image and on Metahistory.org, reinterprets Archons as a psychic or quasi-material intelligence active in the modern world. This is a modern speculative interpretation, not the consensus of Gnostic scholarship. Scholars such as Elaine Pagels and Bentley Layton treat Archons as mythological figures within ancient cosmological systems.
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- Meyer, Marvin (ed.). The Nag Hammadi Scriptures: The International Edition. HarperOne, 2007.
- Pagels, Elaine. The Gnostic Gospels. Random House, 1979.
- King, Karen L. The Secret Revelation of John. Harvard University Press, 2006.
- Turner, John D. and Anne McGuire (eds.). The Nag Hammadi Library After Fifty Years. Brill, 1997.
- Pearson, Birger A. Ancient Gnosticism: Traditions and Literature. Fortress Press, 2007.
- Lash, John Lamb. Not in His Image: Gnostic Vision, Sacred Ecology, and the Future of Belief. Chelsea Green, 2006.
- Robinson, James M. (ed.). The Nag Hammadi Library in English. 3rd ed. HarperCollins, 1988.
- Rasimus, Tuomas. Paradise Reconsidered in Gnostic Mythmaking. Brill, 2009.