Welcome back to Gnostic Insights and the Gnostic Reformation on Substack. Today I'm going to read one of the books out of the Nag Hammadi that we haven't talked about before. It's called Authoritative Discourse, Authentikos Logos, and it was part of the original Nag Hammadi codices. I’ve been thinking of codices as scrolls but actually they were the first form of bound books. It's a very short book, unlike the Tripartite Tractate, which is the second longest book in the Nag Hammadi. This is one of the shortest books in the Nag Hammadi, but it was very well preserved except for the first page. It had gotten damaged and is missing a few words, but the rest of it's intact.







And I think it's such a lovely book, and it goes so well with our Gnostic Gospel teaching, that we're going to talk about it today. This book is not particularly Christian because it doesn't talk about the Savior, but what it does talk about a lot is the Spirit and the Soul. And these are two characters represented in this book as a fiancé, the Spirit, which we call the Self, and then the main character is called the Soul, but we refer to that as the Ego. So it's about the split between the Self and the Ego, and what drives them apart, and what brings them together. It begins with talking about the Fullness, or the Aeon of Aeons, is what I call it. And it says, From the Fullness,



From these, came the invisible Soul of Righteousness. One member with them, one body with them, one Spirit with them. Whether she's coming down or is in the realm of the Fullness, she is not apart from them, but they see her and she looks at them through the invisible Word, or Logos.



And by the way, this Soul, which I identify as the Ego, is characterized as a female gender, and the Self is characterized as the male gender. We haven't talked about gendering the parts of our Soul like that, but in this Authoritative Discourse, they're a betrothed couple. They belong together, though they have not yet joined each other. It says,




Secretly her bridegroom, [that's the Self], obtained the Word, [that's what we call Logos]. He held it to her mouth to make her eat it like food. He applied it to her eyes like medicine, to make her see with her mind, and perceive those who are kin to her, and learn about her root, that she may be able to hold on to the branch from which she has come, receive what is hers, and renounce matter.




So this is talking about how the Self is instructing the Ego not to become lost in this world. Then there's a little discussion about when a man marries a woman who already has previous children from another marriage, how those are different children than the children that he fathers with her, and that the children that he fathers with her are his genes, belong to him as well as to her when it comes to inheritance. And so this is a metaphor for our Self and our Ego to be wed to one another. This metaphor refers to after the Ego comes down to this fallen world, and leaves the Fullness of God, that the marriage she has is to our physical material body, and the children that she begets by the material body are her stepchildren, and that they possess the inheritance of their father, which are, get this,




exalted passions, life's pleasures, hateful jealousies, boastful expressions, foolish experiences, reproachful words.




And then there's a few more missing words here, and it says,




If a soul, [and whenever I say soul, think Ego], if a soul who is ignorant chooses a spirit of prostitution, he casts her out and throws her into a brothel. He has left her to corruption because she has abandoned modesty.




That is, the Self, which is still above in the Fullness,