“Seal yourselves with this seal … Say it once only. Hold this cipher … in your hands.”
Those are instructions from Jesus, and you won’t find them in any Sunday school. They come from the Second Book of Jeu, where he tells his disciples what to do when the rulers of a heavenly realm block their way after death. The dots stand for a drawing, a name nobody can pronounce, and a number, all of which change at every level of the climb.
Most people come to Gnosticism through its poetry, through Thomas or Thunder. Almost nobody comes through the Books of Jeu, and I suspect that’s because they read like the wiring diagram for the poetry. They’re also about the closest we’ll ever get to watching one of these groups at work.
A Confused Heap of Leaves
These books weren’t buried at Nag Hammadi. They survive in the Bruce Codex, a Coptic manuscript brought out of Egypt more than 200 years ago and now held at Oxford. Its pages were shuffled and many were already gone by the time scholars saw it. G. R. S. Mead called what the first editors faced “the confused heap of leaves.”
Carl Schmidt sorted the heap in the 1890s and gave the two main works their name, which appears nowhere in the codex. He took it from the Pistis Sophia, where Jesus says the lower mysteries can be found “in the two Books of Yew” (Yew is Mead’s spelling of Jeu). That book says Enoch wrote them down in Paradise and hid them in “the rock Ararad” so they’d survive the flood. Whether these are really those books is still argued, though Erin Evans, whose 2015 study is the one to read, thinks they’re most probably some version of them.
Scholars tend to date the surviving form of these texts to the late fourth or early fifth century, and Evans thinks the originals probably go back to third-century Egypt. She also points out that the group behind them doesn’t match anything in the heresy hunters’ catalogs, so she gave it a name of its own, the Jeuians.
That name comes from Jeu, the being who populates the divine realms on the Father’s orders. Unlike the ignorant creator of the Secret Book of John, Jeu isn’t a villain. Evans calls him the true god, and getting to him is the whole point.
Sixty Treasuries and a Pebble
The First Book is a map. It describes sixty Treasuries of Light, the realms stacked between the soul and its destination, and 28 of those descriptions survive. Each gets a floor plan, with a ruler at the center and six watchers guarding the gates, three for the way in and three for the way out.
And I do mean a floor plan. Evans says these books are “the only extant early Gnostic document containing diagrams or images.” You turn the page and there are nested squares with gates cut into them, then rings and spokes and eight-pointed stars. Scholar P. C. Finney said the pictures “have nothing to do with the world as we know it.”
After a long gap in the manuscript, the map turns into directions. For each treasury you seal yourself with a drawn seal and say its name once. You hold a number in one hand and repeat a second name three times.
The Greek word behind “cipher” is psephos, a pebble, and Evans thinks the number was probably written or engraved on a small stone you’d actually hold. The cipher for the sixtieth treasury is 30885.
Do all that correctly, and “the watchers and the ranks and the veils are drawn back, until you go to the place of their Father.” Then you do it again at the next level, with new names. The Second Book repeats the routine for the aeons, the lower realms you pass through first, and there the pebble goes in both hands.
Readers have called this repetitive, unimaginative and dull. It is! Evans’s answer is that it’s also “one of the most detailed ascension handbooks to survive late antiquity.” Nobody calls a pilot’s checklist unimaginative.
The Rites on This Side of Death
The Second Book also holds what Evans calls “the most detailed earthly ritual manual found in any known early Christian Gnostic text.” There are four rites in a row, baptisms of water, fire and the Holy Spirit, and then a mystery to remove the evil of the archons, the powers who run the lower cosmos.
Getting in took a while. The disciples in the story had followed Jesus “for twelve years” first, and whether or not that was the literal rule for everyone, Evans reads it as a sign of a long probation.
Candidates wear linen, with plants on their heads, in their hands and in their mouths. The altar holds vine branches, incense and two pitchers of wine, and the bread is set out by headcount, which is a small detail that gives the game away. Someone planned this for a group of whatever size showed up.
They turn to the four corners of the world and stand with their feet together. Jesus recites a run of sacred names and then prays, “Hear me my Father, thou father of all fatherhoods, thou infinite Light.” In the baptism of water, the sign of success is that wine turns into water. That’s the wedding at Cana in reverse, although Evans is careful to call any link speculation.
The fire rite ends with a line I find moving, even in a manual:
“Now my Father, if thou hast forgiven their sins and thou hast erased their iniquities, and thou hast caused them to be numbered within the Kingdom of Light, do thou give me a sign in the fire of this fragrant incense.”
We never learn what the sign was. Evans wonders whether that’s deliberate, since the mystery cults kept their final moments secret too, and some things had to be seen in person. The last rite moves to an altar by the sea, with asbestos and agate-stone among the offerings. When it’s over, the disciples rejoice because they’ve been made immortal.
Why Modern Readers Flinch
Scholars haven’t been kind to any of this. According to Evans, an earlier generation barely gave the Books of Jeu a few paragraphs and treated them as “an ignorant and convoluted morass.” Spiritual readers often skip them too, and I understand the impulse. If you came to these texts because Thomas sounds like a Zen master, a list of incense ingredients is a letdown.
The trouble is that we’ve been editing. It’s tempting to treat Gnosticism as pure philosophy, or as depth psychology that happens to wear robes. The Jeuians handled pebbles and paid for frankincense, and Evans argues the expense was likely part of proving yourself, comparing it to the cost of initiation into the mysteries of Isis. She reads their system as basically Egyptian, with Christian names laid over it, and she sets the First Book beside the Book of the Dead, the old guide to getting past the gatekeepers of the next world.
This complicates something I’ve said on this site more than once. I’ve argued that gnosis is the knowledge that transforms, as opposed to mere information. For the Jeuians, though, a great deal of saving knowledge looked exactly like information, seals and numbers you had to get right. Evans says the names work as credentials.
I’d only add that it wasn’t information alone. The same book that hands out ciphers tells the teacher to command each candidate “not to swear falsely,” not to steal or slander, and “to let their yea be yea, and their nay be nay.” The wider mystery tradition treated initiation as something done to a person over years. This group kept the pebble and the moral life in the same handbook.
What to Do With a Manual You’ll Never Use
Nobody reading this needs the name of the fifty-sixth treasury. There are still a few things worth taking from these books.
Look before you read. Find the diagrams, which Evans reproduces, and spend ten minutes with them before reading a word of explanation. You’ll get a sense of what a person meant by “heaven” when it had floor plans.
Decide what you’d want in your hand. The Jeuians prepared for the worst moment they could picture, and they prepared long before it arrived. You don’t have to share their map to ask the question. What sentence would you want to have by heart in a hospital corridor at 3 a.m.? Pick one, and learn it the way these people learned things, by repetition, until it comes without effort.
Give it a body. Write that sentence or a word from it on a smooth stone and keep the stone where your hand will find it. It’ll look a bit silly. The Jeuians would’ve understood that a thing you can hold is harder to forget than a thing you once agreed with.
Even the ending is gone. The Second Book breaks off before Jesus explains the one mystery he keeps praising above all the others, the forgiveness of sins. As Evans dryly notes, it remains a mystery. Somebody in Egypt probably knew those pages by heart.
The Books of Jeu are quoted from Violet MacDermot’s translation as given in Erin Evans, The Books of Jeu and the Pistis Sophia as Handbooks to Eternity (Brill, 2015), which also supplied the Finney quotation. The opening lines come from the formula Evans quotes for the ascent through the aeons, which recurs with slight variation at each level. The Pistis Sophia and Mead’s bibliographic note are quoted from G. R. S. Mead’s 1921 edition.
