Women in Gnosticism

Abstract

This chapter goes further along this track in ‘Women in Gnosticism’, noting that real women are difficult to find from the sources conventionally identified as ‘Gnostic’. The few that are mentioned in a variety of sources—Marcellina, Flora, and Flavia Sophē—remain enigmatic, mere fleeting mentions that force us to draw on all our resources to reconstruct even the barest contours of their lives. In every case, however, these women appear to have irritated and scandalized the pious self-proclaimed arbiters of Christian ‘orthodoxy’. Sadly, however, these women do not seem to have had better spiritual lives in ‘Gnostic’ circles; there, too, they encountered men ready to take advantage of the power differential evident in Roman imperial Christian culture, such as it was at the time. To be perhaps less pessimistic, however, the language and imagery of ‘Gnostic’ documents—particularly those found at Nag Hammadi—contain often startling plays on sexual politics in the spiritual realm. At times, these result in sweeping cosmic dramas that place human women not merely as victims of male spiritual malevolence but as heroines who are able to transcend their earthly fates because there is a place, even in the highest heavenly realms, where ‘the feminine’ holds sway; beyond that, even, gender differences melt away and are absorbed into an absolute, genderless oneness of existence.