Gnosticism is interesting because it presents familiar Christian and other Biblical stories in a new light. One of the big ones is how the female species is portrayed. Centuries of fucked up stuff was done by Christians to women based on Genesis 3, wherein the Serpent tempts Eve into eating of the Tree of Knowledge. Eve then tempts Adam, they realize their naked, and God boots them out of Paradise. Women are thereby responsible for what’s called “Original Sin.” Tertullian, an early Church father, even preached to women:

. . . you are the devil’s gateway. . . you are she who persuaded him whom the devil did not dare attack. . . . Do you not know that you are each an Eve? The sentence of God on your sex lives on in this age; the guilt, necessarily, lives on too.

So that’s some fun stuff, but it’s totally different in gnosticism. Actually, there are a variety of writings on and interpretations of this story in gnosticism, and I won’t claim to know all of them. But the story of Eve seems generally to be cast in a rather different light. In gnostic cosmology, Adam is originally created by the archons, the servants of the false deity who form & inhabit the material world. But their power is not great enough to bring Adam to life, so he remains inanimate.

Sophia sees this and descends to give him life. In the Apocryphon of John, the story goes:

I entered into the midst of the dungeon which is the prison of the body. And I spoke thus: “He who hears, let him arise from the deep sleep.” And then he (Adam) wept and shed tears. After he wiped away his bitter tears he spoke, asking: “Who is it that calls my name, and whence has this hope come unto me, while I am in the chains of this prison?” And I spoke thus: “I am the Pronoia of the pure light; I am the thought of the undefiled spirit. . . . Arise and remember . . . and follow your root, which is I . . . and beware of the deep sleep.”

In another Gnostic text, On the Origin of the World, Sophia sends her daughter down to Adam in her stead. Her daughter is named Zoe (”life”), and is also called Eve. Eve/Zoe becomes “as an instructor in order that she might raise up Adam, in whom there is no spiritual soul.” She sees the inanimate Adam and takes pity on him, saying:

“Adam, live! Rise up upon the earth!” Immediately her words produced a result for when Adam rose up, right away he opened his eyes. When he saw her, he said: “You will be called ‘mother of the living’, because you are the one who gave me life.”

Then there’s this whole thing where the archons realize what happened, and flip out. They didn’t give Adam a soul in the first place, because they knew he would be more powerful than them (plus I don’t think they can create souls, but who knows). They then decide that they are going to rape Eve, so that she’ll produce offspring under their control. But Eve is too strong and escapes from them, and then supposedly turns into a tree. But she also creates this sort of projected incarnation of herself to stay and be with Adam. The archons then make up the phony story in Genesis about how Eve was created out of Adam’s rib, to fool Adam (The archons love to make up stories to obscure the truth - like the crucifixion).

They also make up this big prohibitive story about how Adam and Eve 2.0 better not eat from the Tree of Knowledge (ie, Eve 1.0 - Sophia Zoe) or else they will die. But Sophia up in the pleroma (the real heaven) sends down the serpent to help break the spell of the archons. The serpent, the wisest of the beasts, instructs Eve 2.0 to eat the fruit of the tree. When they do, On the Origin of the World states:

Then their intellect became open. For when they had eaten, the light of knowledge had shone upon them.

So they were reunited with Sophia, with gnosis, but the archons saw this and get scared that Adam & Eve are going to overthrow them, and cast them out of Paradise. Sophia seeing this, in turn, seecomes out of the Pleroma, and casts the archons out of Paradise as well, so that they have to dwell on the earth as evil spirits.

This is of course very different from the orthodox Christian interpretation of the Genesis legend. Eve, instead of being the world’s biggest sinner, is a savior twice over. Imagine the differences in the subsequent history of Christianity that would have occurred had this view of woman-as-savior prevailed.

There’s one thing that’s still sort of troubling though, in this light. If you go back to the Apocryphon of John, and look at the creation of the material world, you’ll find sort of a displaced version of Original Sin attributed to the feminine power:

She [Sophia] wanted to bring forth a likeness out of herself without the consent of the Spirit, - he had not approved - and without her consort, and without his consideration. And though the person of her maleness had not approved, and she had not found her agreement, and she had thought without the consent of the Spirit and the knowledge of her agreement, (yet) she brought forth. And because of the invincible power which is in her, her thought did not remain idle, and something came out of her which was imperfect and different from her appearance, because she had created it without her consort. And it was dissimilar to the likeness of its mother, for it has another form.

“And when she saw (the consequences of) her desire, it changed into a form of a lion-faced serpent. And its eyes were like lightning fires which flash. She cast it away from her, outside that place, that no one of the immortal ones might see it, for she had created it in ignorance. And she surrounded it with a luminous cloud, and she placed a throne in the middle of the cloud that no one might see it except the holy Spirit who is called the mother of the living. And she called his name Yaltabaoth.

Basically, what happens is that Sophia wants to understand the Divine Source, the Father which she had come from, so she tries to emulate him. But in doing so, she makes a grave error, which causes her creation to become a spontaneous abortion. This abortion becomes the material world, and the Demiurge, the false god who rules it. (For more info, I have a post from a few days ago which talks about how Sophia’s mistake was tied to trying to understand the Father through pure reason alone.)

Sophia is eventually redeemed for the error which she commits, but it’s interesting that it’s still essentially the same story. A woman is curious and her curiosity causes a fall from a state of grace to a state of pain & illusion. In some sense it’s merely a displacement from one character to another for the Fall. Of course, all that stuff about Sophia descending into her creation as Zoe/Eve complicates the whole thing a good bit. But that’s part of what’s so fun about gnosticism (and religion in general) is that it’s endlessly complex, and there are always more layers and interpretations which you can pull out of a story. It’s summed up very well by that quote from Hannah Arendt:

Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it.

Whereas perhaps the error that orthodox religions make is in over-defining their stories, so that meaning becomes ossified and frozen: a list of bullet points, rather than a pulsating matrix of possibilities.