Cover art for A Gnostic Glossary: rippling concentric circles radiating from a point of golden light on a deep blue gradient

Gnostic Glossary: 20 Terms You Need to Know

Every tradition guards its door with vocabulary, and Gnosticism’s door is better guarded than most. Open any Nag Hammadi text cold and the aeons, archons, and pleromas arrive without introductions, which sends many willing readers straight back out. This glossary is the missing doorman. Twenty terms, defined in plain language, ordered so that reading straight through gives you the whole cosmology in miniature, from the unknowable source down through the fall, the world, the human layers, and the way back. Bookmark it, and the old texts open considerably easier, since between them these twenty words carry most of the weight in any Gnostic sentence you will ever meet. ...

August 30, 2026 · 5 min · Jeremy Matthews