of spiritual relevance for the contemporary seeker. Aspects of the Gnostic worldview, such as alienation from society, distrust of religious authority, creative mythmaking, and direct personal spiritual experience echo in the hearts of modern spiritual seekers. Though there have been many forms of mystical or esoteric Christianity (or inner Christianity to use the helpful term proposed by Richard Smoley), the Gnostics are particularly notable because of their prominent position in the early history of Christianity.

    In its broadest form, the Gnostic myth states that we humans are stranded in matter and yet each of us has a spark of divinity within, which can be fanned into a fire, through which we can each partake of the nature of the true and highest God. These themes have resurfaced in modern movies and books like The Matrix, The Truman Show, and Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy. Millions of copies of the Nag Hammadi library —

twelve Gnostic codices discovered in Egypt in 1945—have been sold, and the recently published Gospel of Judas has been the subject of a media circus, appearing in newspapers, magazines, and television documentaries and spawning a cottage industry of scholarly and popular books.

    Yet anyone who flips open a Gnostic text, whether casually or with the intention of serious study for a spiritual or scholarly purpose, or even reads a popular book on Gnosticism, is confronted by a wide range of obscure terminology, a bewildering array of neologisms, untranslated Greek terms, “barbarous words,” and specialist academic jargon. The world of Gnostic mythology is populated by dozens of archons and aeons, each with some obscure name, and a demiurge called Yaldabaoth (or Ialdabaoth or some other spellings) or Saklas or Samael. There are hylics, choics, psychics, and pneumatics, a pleroma and a kenoma. Wisdom is often called Sophia, but why is