Somewhere in Egypt, probably in the second or third century, a person sat down to answer a friend’s question. The friend wanted to know who the powers that run this world actually are. The answer that came back was the first six chapters of Genesis, retold by someone who sounds like they were standing in the garden the whole time.
That letter survived in Nag Hammadi Codex II, copied in right before On the Origin of the World. Bentley Layton titled it The Reality of the Rulers, Marvin Meyer went with The Nature of the Rulers, and older books call it The Hypostasis of the Archons. All three are attempts at one slippery Greek word, hypostasis. Meyer’s introduction says that whichever you pick, the point of the text is that the rulers are real, and that they can be beaten.
I’ve quoted this text before when writing about the archons. This time I want to walk it start to finish, because it runs about a dozen pages in the codex and it’s the best place I know to watch a Gnostic writer read scripture.
A Letter About the Powers
The writer starts with Paul, “the great apostle,” and his line about a struggle that isn’t against flesh and blood but against the authorities of the world. Then comes the reason for writing: “I have sent you this writing because you have asked about the real nature of the authorities.”
Meyer thinks the text was composed in Greek, most likely in Alexandria, and that although it’s Christian in its present form, most of the material in it is Jewish. Layton even spotted puns on Eve’s name that only work in Aramaic, which means pieces of this story were being told in a Semitic language before anyone translated them.
I bring that up early because the retelling can look like an outsider’s attack on the Hebrew Bible. Given where the material came from, it reads more like a family argument, between people who knew Genesis cold and loved it enough to fight over what it meant.
The Blind Boast
The story proper begins with a single sentence that the rest of the text never stops answering. “The leader of the authorities is blind.” Out of his power, ignorance, and arrogance, he announces that he is God and that there’s no other.
In the Apocryphon of John the same scene runs much longer, and I’ve written about that version. Here a voice comes down from a figure called Incorruptibility and says, “You are wrong, Samael,” a name the text glosses as “blind god.”
Incorruptibility then looks down into the waters below, and her reflection appears there. The rulers see it and fall in love with it, but they can’t take hold of it. In the text’s words, what is only of soul cannot grasp what is of spirit.
Building Adam as Bait
The rulers can’t reach the image, so they build a trap for it. “Come, let’s create a human of soil from the earth,” they say. They shape a body after their own form and after the image they saw in the water, hoping the image will fall for its lookalike and come down where they can grab it.
It doesn’t work. Samael breathes into the figure’s face and gives it a soul, but the thing just lies on the ground. The rulers blow on it “like storm winds” and still can’t make it stand. The narrator’s verdict is blunt: they did not understand the power of God, because they are powerless.
Only when the Spirit comes down from above and settles inside the body does the figure become a living soul, and only then does he get the name Adam. The rulers can make a body and a soul, but the spirit, the part that counts, was never theirs to give. Then the writer pauses to say something that comes back near the end: “All these things came to be by the will of the Father of the All.”
Eve Wakes Adam
In Genesis, God puts Adam into a deep sleep and takes a rib. Here the rulers plot the sleep together, and the narrator tells you what it is. “The deep sleep they made to fall upon him, and he slept, is ignorance.”
They open Adam’s side and a living woman comes out, whom the text calls “the woman of spirit.” She walks up to the sleeping man and says two words: “Arise, Adam.”
He sees her and says, “You have given me life. You will be called the Mother of the living.” Genesis has Adam name Eve “the mother of all the living” too, in the NIV, but there it comes after the curse. Here it’s the first thing he says when he wakes up, and she’s the reason he’s awake. In this telling the spiritual woman had the life to give, and Adam was the one who needed it.
The Laugh and the Tree
The rulers see Eve talking with Adam and want her for themselves. They chase her. And she laughs at them, “because of their foolishness and blindness.”
In their grip she turns into a tree, the way Daphne does in the Greek myth, and she leaves behind a shadow that looks like her. The rulers defile the shadow, thinking they’ve caught her. Spiritual Eve escapes, and the Eve of flesh stays in the story.
The spiritual presence isn’t done. She comes back “in the shape of the serpent, the instructor” and asks Adam and Eve what Samael told them. The woman of flesh repeats the command about the tree of knowledge and its death sentence. The instructor answers:
You will not surely die, for he said this to you out of jealousy. Rather, your eyes will open and you will be like gods, knowing good and evil.
Those are almost the serpent’s exact words in Genesis 3, but the speaker has changed. In the standard reading, the serpent lies. In this one, the serpent is the only voice in the garden telling the truth, and the jealous party is the ruler who wanted humans kept in the dark.
Adam and Eve eat, and what they see when their eyes open is their own lack. They realize they’ve been “stripped of the spiritual” and grab fig leaves. Samael comes asking “Where are you, Adam?” and the narrator adds a line Genesis never would: “For he did not know what had happened.”
Toil as a Strategy
The curses follow the familiar script, with one addition that I think is the sharpest sentence in the text. After the expulsion:
The rulers threw humanity into great confusion and a life of toil, so that their people might be preoccupied with things of the world and not have time to be occupied with the holy Spirit.
Read that as a theory of why you never get around to the inner life. Exhaustion isn’t a side effect of the system. It’s the design. Anyone who has planned to meditate and then answered email for two hours instead has met these rulers.
Norea Burns the Ark
The second half of the text belongs to a woman you won’t find in your Bible. After Cain, Abel, and Seth, Eve gives birth to a daughter, Norea, “the virgin whom the forces did not defile.”
When the rulers decide to flood the world, Noah builds his ark. Norea asks to board. He refuses, so she blows on the ark and it burns, and he has to build it again. I laughed out loud the first time I read that.
Then the rulers come for her, claiming that her mother Eve gave in to them. Norea’s reply is one of the best speeches in the Nag Hammadi library:
You did not have sex with my mother but with one of your own ilk. For I am not from you. I am from the world above.
She calls out to God for help, and an angel named Eleleth descends while the rulers scatter. He introduces himself as Understanding, one of the Four Luminaries, and tells her, “I shall teach you about your root.”
What Eleleth Teaches
From here Norea narrates in her own voice, asking where the rulers came from and what they’re made of. Eleleth tells her the story behind the story.
Sophia wanted to create something without her partner. A curtain hangs between the realms above and below, and a shadow formed beneath it. The shadow became matter, and out of it came something “like an aborted fetus” that took the shape of a lion-faced beast. That beast is the blind ruler from page one, and the longer Sophia myth fills in how she got there.
Eleleth also tells a story I find hopeful, about what happens after Sophia’s daughter Zoe breathes out a fiery angel that binds the ruler and throws him into Tartaros. One of his seven children, Sabaoth, watches that happen and repents. He condemns his father, sings praises to Sophia, and ends up set over the seventh heaven with Zoe at his right hand to teach him. Even an archon can turn.
Then Norea asks the question the whole letter has been building toward. “My lord, am I also from their matter?”
Eleleth answers that she and her offspring are from the Father, and that the rulers can’t reach them. “All who know this way of truth are deathless among dying humanity.”
Reading It for Yourself
You can read Meyer’s translation in under an hour, and here’s what I’d suggest if you do. Keep Genesis 2 and 3 open next to it, because every change the writer makes is deliberate and the fun is in catching them. Notice who gets renamed and which lines are quoted word for word.
Watch for the refrain that everything happened “by the will of the Father of the All.” It shows up in both halves of the text, each time right after the rulers have made a mess. The writer wants you to hold both at once, the mess and the plan.
And try Norea’s question on yourself. When you’re tired and sure the whole machine was built to keep you busy, ask it. Am I also from their matter? The letter was written to give one friend a way to answer no.
The Nature of the Rulers (NHC II,4) is quoted from Marvin Meyer’s translation and introduction in The Nag Hammadi Scriptures (HarperOne, 2010), where Bentley Layton’s observations on the Aramaic puns are also reported. Layton’s own translation in The Gnostic Scriptures uses the title The Reality of the Rulers. Genesis 3:20 is quoted from the NIV. Genesis 2:17 and 3:4-5 are paraphrased.
