The longest creation story in the Nag Hammadi library has no name. The scribes who copied it never gave it a title, so scholars named it after its subject, and some older books just call it “Untitled Work.” Marvin Meyer, who translated it for The Nag Hammadi Scriptures, calls that label unfortunate. I agree with him, because it undersells a text that argues like a lawyer and cites books nobody has seen in sixteen centuries.

Those citations are my favorite thing about it. Every few pages the author stops the story and tells you where to read more. “You will find their names and functions in the Book of Solomon,” it says about a list of demons.

None of the books it points to survive. Reading it is a bit like clicking through an old web page where every footnote is a dead link.

If you’ve read the Secret Book of John or my walk through the Reality of the Rulers, you already know the outline of this myth. On the Origin of the World fills it in with more detail than any other Gnostic text, and here’s a map of what it adds.

What Kind of Text This Is

On the Origin of the World is the fifth text in Nag Hammadi Codex II, copied right after the Reality of the Rulers. Pieces of it also turn up in Codex XIII and in some Coptic fragments now in the British Library. Three partial copies is a lot for a Gnostic text, and Meyer suggests it may have been a popular one.

It was written in Greek, almost certainly in Egypt and maybe in Alexandria. Birger Pearson and others date the version we have to the late third or early fourth century, though it may rest on older material from the second. The scholar Hans-Gebhard Bethge thinks it was written to win converts, a kind of public pamphlet for the Gnostic worldview.

That fits the shape. Louis Painchaud showed that it follows the outline the Greco-Roman rhetoric handbooks taught for a speech:

  • a short prologue stating the thesis
  • a long narration, which is most of the text
  • a brief proof
  • an epilogue about the end of things

So it’s a myth, but it’s also an essay with an argument. Keep that in mind, and the odd asides start to make sense.

Chaos Has a Cause

The opening sentence picks a fight with everybody. Gods and people alike say nothing existed before chaos, and the author announces, “I shall prove they all are wrong.”

That’s a jab at the standard Greek account. Hesiod’s Theogony starts with Chaos coming into being first, and an educated reader in Alexandria would have known it.

The proof here is short and kind of clever. Chaos is darkness, the author says, and darkness is really a shadow. A shadow has to be cast by something. So something was there before chaos, and it was light.

I like this as a way into the whole myth. The darkness of the world isn’t the first thing. It’s a side effect of something bright standing nearby.

A Ruler Named by Accident

From that shadow, through a long chain of births, a ruler finally rises out of the waters. He’s lion-faced and powerful, and he has no idea where he came from. Pistis Sophia, the divine Wisdom who set all this in motion, sees him moving in the deep and calls to him, “Young man, move over here.”

The text says that phrase is what “Yaldabaoth” means. Scholars usually derive the name from Aramaic for “child of chaos,” but the author’s version is funnier. The ruler never saw her face. He only heard a voice in the water and named himself from it.

Then the comedy gets broader, because Yaldabaoth makes three sons and coos at each baby. The first one opens its eyes and says “EE,” so his father names him Yao. The second says “EH” and becomes Eloai. The third says “AS” and becomes Astaphaios.

Meyer calls this lighthearted, and it is. It’s also aimed at something. Yao and Eloai sound like names for the God of Israel, so the joke lands on Jewish scripture.

The Gnostic writers borrowed nearly everything from that scripture and then turned its God into a bumbling father in a nursery. I think you can enjoy the satire and still notice who it was written at. Plenty of Gnostic texts carry that edge, and an honest reader keeps it in view.

The Dare

You’ll find Yaldabaoth’s famous boast in the Reality of the Rulers, “I am God, and there is no other but me.” On the Origin of the World keeps it and then adds a scene that the shorter text doesn’t have.

After Pistis rebukes him, the ruler hears her voice again and recognizes it as the voice that named him. He groans. He’s ashamed, and he’s afraid the other powers will find out someone existed before him. The text calls him a fool who “acted rashly,” and then he says it out loud anyway:

“If anything existed before me, let it appear so that we may see its light.”

And at once, look, light shone out of the eighth heaven above and passed through all the heavens of the earth.

What gets me is the order of events. He already knows he’s wrong, and the groaning comes before the dare. Most of us have done some version of this, demanding proof for something we’ve already admitted to ourselves, hoping the demand will make it go away.

In the myth the proof shows up immediately, and there’s a human figure standing in the light. The text calls him Adam of light.

Desire Lit From One Lamp

The next section is where the text gets lush. Light spills onto the earth, and out of it comes Eros, the god of desire, more beautiful than anything in chaos. Every power that sees him falls in love.

To explain how one Eros could be in all of them, the author uses an image I keep thinking about. Many lamps are lit from a single lamp, and “the light of the single lamp is not diminished.” Desire spreads through the whole creation without running out.

After Eros come the plants. A grapevine grows from spilled blood, which is why wine stirs desire, and the first rose sprouts out of a thorn bush, from the blood of the soul who loved Eros. For a tradition people often call body-hating, this is a lot of flowers. (I’ve written more on whether the Gnostics hated the body, and this text is good evidence for the “it’s complicated” answer.)

Three Adams and Nine Hundred Thirty Years

The garden story runs close to Genesis and to the Reality of the Rulers. The serpent is “the instructor,” Eve is the one who brings life to Adam, and when the two eat the fruit, “their minds opened.” The new material is in the details around it.

There are three Adams here. The first is the spiritual Adam of light from the first day. The second, made of soul, appears on the sixth day. The third is the earthly Adam of the eighth day, and he’s the one we descend from.

My favorite detail is about life spans. Fate gave every person a thousand years, and the rulers, out of jealousy, wanted to cut that down.

They couldn’t change fate, so each of the seven took away ten years. That leaves nine hundred thirty, which is exactly Adam’s age at death in Genesis 5. The author took a number from the Bible and wrote a petty little backstory for it.

Phoenixes Only in Egypt

Near the end of the narration, the author breaks off to discuss phoenixes, water serpents, and the sacred bulls of Egypt. Each one stands for something. The three kinds of phoenix match three kinds of people and three baptisms, and the phoenix that dies and rises again is a picture of the end of the age.

Then comes a line of plain hometown pride. These great images have appeared only in Egypt, the author says, which shows that Egypt is like God’s paradise. You can hear an Alexandrian writer smiling as he puts that in.

How the World Ends

The epilogue turns to the people who carry the light, the ones the text calls “kingless” and perfect. Then the whole structure comes down. The rulers turn on each other, Yaldabaoth attacks himself “until he is no more,” and the heavens of chaos collapse into one another. Its last image is light pulling back to where it started:

The darkness will be like something that never was, and the source of darkness will be dissolved.

That line keeps a promise. Back in the dare scene, Pistis warned Yaldabaoth that all the deficiency would end “like what never was.” The author set up the ending two dozen codex pages earlier and paid it off.

Reading It Without Getting Lost

On the Origin of the World fills thirty manuscript pages of Codex II, from page 97 to page 127. Here’s how I’d approach it.

  • Read the Reality of the Rulers first. It’s shorter and sits right before this text in the codex, and once you’ve seen the plot there, you can watch what this author adds.
  • Keep a running list of the lost books it cites, like the First Book of Noraia and the Archangelic Book of Moses the Prophet. It’s a strange window onto a whole shelf of literature that didn’t survive.
  • Mark every time someone laughs. Sophia Zoe laughs at the rulers’ plan to make humans, Eve laughs at them in the garden, and the rulers themselves laugh at their chief. Laughter here is a sign that someone sees more than the powers do.
  • Skim the lists of names on a first read. The seven heavens and the forty-nine demons will still be there when you come back.

And keep the dare in mind as you go. The next time you catch yourself demanding proof for something you’ve already admitted, what would you expect to see if the light actually showed up?

On the Origin of the World (NHC II,5) is quoted from Marvin Meyer’s translation in The Nag Hammadi Scriptures (HarperOne, 2010). The notes on its manuscripts, date, structure, and the meaning of Yaldabaoth come from Meyer’s introduction in the same volume, which summarizes the work of Hans-Gebhard Bethge, Louis Painchaud, and Birger Pearson.