Gnostic Society Library: Sources on Gnosticism and Gnosis

Collection Index:

Nag Hammadi Library

Classic Gnostic Scriptures

Valentinus & His Tradition

GRS Mead Collection

Patristic Polemical Works

Christian Apocrypha

Corpus Hermeticum

Manichaean Writings

Mandaean Writings

Cathar Writings

Alchemical Writings

Modern Gnostic Texts

Dead Sea Scrolls

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About using the Library. . .

The Gnostic Society Library (a section of The Gnosis Archive), contains a vast collection of primary documents relating to the Gnostic tradition as well as a selection of in-depth audio lectures and brief archive notes designed to orient study of the documents, their sources, and the religious tradition they represent. (See the Overview of the Library Collection, below.)

The library includes over a thousand documents (four gigabytes of material) related to the Gnostic tradition, including all major Gnostic writings and anti-Gnostic patristic texts. Using the Archive Search function, students and researches can easily find just about any anything relating to the Gnostic tradition.

Lectures provided in the library are from the audio archives of The Gnostic Society in Los Angeles and BC Recordings; they are presented in MP3 format or an older RealAudio format and run about 75 minutes in length. As you visit the library, set aside time to listen to a lecture. Remember to also visit the Gnostic Society Bookstore for a collection of the best current works on Gnosis and Gnosticism.

Recently updated in the Library:

The Nag Hammadi Library collection received a major update in May 2015. Several prominent scholars have contributed editions of their authoritative translations to our library collection. Over twenty of these new translations have now been added to the online collection. We are especially grateful for the assistance and contributions of Dr. Willis Barnstone, Dr. John Turner, Dr. Stevan Davies, and the late Dr. Marvin Meyer. This resource in the Gnostic Society library receives a few million unique visits each year and is referenced by many academic courses which survey the Gnostic tradition, as well as by readers from all over the world.

Overview of the Library Collection. . .

The Nag Hammadi Library

The Nag Hammadi Library, a collection of thirteen ancient books (called "codices") containing over fifty texts, was discovered in upper Egypt in 1945. This immensely important discovery includes a large number of primary Gnostic scriptures – texts once thought to have been entirely destroyed during the early Christian struggle to define "orthodoxy" – scriptures such as the Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Philip, and the Gospel of Truth. The discovery and translation of the Nag Hammadi library has provided impetus to a major re-evaluation of early Christian history and the nature of Gnosticism. (Readers unfamiliar with this history may wish to read an excerpt from Elaine Pagels' excellent popular introduction to the Nag Hammadi texts, The Gnostic Gospels.)

We have add extensive resources on two centrally important texts from Nag Hammadi: The Gospel of Thomas and The Secret Book of John. Multiple authoritative translations of several Nag Hammadi scriptures are included in the collection.

Valentinus and Valentinian Gnosis. Valentinus was one of the most influential Gnostic Christian teachers of the second century A.D., and was the only Gnostic considered for election as Bishop of Rome (Pope). He founded a movement which spread throughout Europe, the Middle East and North Africa. Despite persecution by developing orthodoxies, the Valentinian school endured for over 600 years. A large number of texts in the Nag Hammadi collection are influence by Valentinian tradition. Due to its importance, we have a large section of the library dedicated specifically to Valentinus and the Valentinian Tradition.

Gnostic Writings and Related Texts (known prior to discovery of the Nag Hammadi Collection).

While the Nag Hammadi Library represents our richest source of classical Gnostic texts, many other primary Gnostic documents were discovered in the century prior to the Nag Hammadi find. These are cataloged in the Classical Gnostic Scriptures and Fragments section – included here you will now find works such as The Gospel of Mary, and a complete translation of the Pistis Sophia. As note above, we also have an extensive resource specifically on Valentinus and the Valentinian Tradition

Of associated interest is the Christian Apocrypha and Early Christian Literature, a section containing other important Christian texts surviving outside canonical tradition, some of which manifest Gnostic influence.

The G.R.S Mead Collection contains over a dozen volumes written by G. R. S. Mead (1863-1933), one the greatest early scholars of Gnosticism. These works provide an invaluable evaluation of texts relating to Gnostic tradition available before discovery of the Nag Hammadi collection.

Until students began uncovering original documents and re-examining Gnosticism, opinion about the tradition was primarily based on the very negatively biased Polemical Works Against the Gnostics by the Church Fathers. In this section we present all the major documents by the patristic heresiologist, and all are included in our full text site search function.

With an interest in Gnosticism awakened by the Nag Hammadi materials, scholars are now re-examining Manichaeism and beginning a more serious consideration of the many Manichaean writings discovered just in the last century. A large sample of these is presented in the Manichaean Writings collection, along with an introductory lecture.

The Cathar religion represents a major medieval resurgence of Gnosticism, and we offer an important collection of Cathar Texts, including the complete manuscript of the Lyon Ritual, Interrogatio Iohannis, and The Book of the Two Principles.

Also included in the library is a section devoted to Mandaean Texts and this still living Gnostic tradition.

Alchemy was recognized by C. G. Jung as another strand of Gnosticism; the library here provides links to a comprehensive collection of Alchemical Writings. And, finally, we have on file a small but growing collection of Texts from Modern Gnosticism

Hermetism and the Hermetic Gnosis – including the Corpus Hermeticum

Beyond the bounds of classical Christian Gnosticism – represented by the above materials – the Hermetic tradition is another very important and influential Western tradition of Gnostic character. The Hermetic writings represents a non-Christian lineage of Gnosticism. Our Corpus Hermeticum and Hermetic Writings section offers the most extensive collection of Hermetic texts available on the internet. Included here you will find introductory material, the complete texts of the Corpus Hermeticum, and essentially all other extant Hermetic writings. Included is an introductory lecture.

The Dead Sea Scrolls Collection

The Dead Sea Scrolls Collection in the Gnostic Society Library is one of the largest and most referenced Dead Sea Scroll resources on the internet. During the middle years of the twentieth century two important but very different collections of ancient religious texts were unearthed in Palestine and Egypt: the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Nag Hammadi Library. Visitors to the Gnostic Society Library often do not understand the distinction between these two discoveries. Since our Library collection contains a vast amount of material related specifically to the Nag Hammadi texts (including complete translations), a comparative description of the two discoveries is useful.

Related Library Resources

No resource on the Internet is a substitute for a good library of books. Students of Gnosticism will find our Annotated Bibliography of Books on Gnosticism to be a useful aid for further research.

A complete collection of patristic writings, all carefully and recently reedited, is available at the CECL Early Church Fathers collection. This site offers the entire Ante-Nicene Fathers and Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers collections (about 38 volumes in the print edition), and includes a search function. The documents are also found in the early Christian writings section at New Advent.

The St. Pachomius Library offers a comprehensive collection of early Christian writings with emphasis on sources of the Orthodox Christian tradition.

An excellent collection of Apocrypha, including Old Testiment Apocrypha, Old Testiment Pseudepigraph and other non-canonical texts is found at the Wesley Center Noncanonical Literature page.

Another site with a fair collection of texts and commentary is the Early Christian Writings site. (This site has copied many of our older files, and references many documents from our collection.)

An Important Note on Internet Text Collections

Almost all of the several dozen internet sites with collections of texts similar to our own obtained their material by directly or indirectly copying some files present at the Gnosis Archive. Ours was perhaps the first major collection of such texts to appear on "the web" in 1994, and thus has served as a source for others creating "their own" collections.

Unfortunately transcription errors, typos, and primitive HTML formatting were present in the massive amount of material added to the Gnosis Archive in our first years; in a repeated process of "copying" they have been very widely propagated around the internet. Over nearly two decades we have made many corrections to these texts. It appears that few of the sites copying material from this collection have taken the time to read, edit and correct the texts! This is of course exactly how the manuscript tradition has propagated errors in the past centuries, though with vastly different technologies of reproduction.

We now kindly request that websites provide links to these pages rather than just copying and randomly reproducing them. If you do copy content, please carefully read and edit it anew; when you find errors, please send us a copy of any corrections so we can improve this stable resource. (We have benefited from public contributions made by many people over the last two decades.) This library is a public resource supported by a wide community of interest, it is not a commercial project.

We continue to express gratitude for the work of our friend Terje Dahl Bergersen of Oslo, Norway who collected initial materials for this internet library in 1994.