Apocalypse of the Alien God. Dylan M. Burns

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texts could survive cataclysms or simply go unread for a long time.⁵⁵ Indeed, the device carries the eschatological implication that only the “last generation (the author’s own)” could “break the seal of the mystery” of God’s plan; or further, it is not the generation of the author that is being confronted with the revealed mystery but that of the reader(s).⁵⁶

      A similar constellation of apocalyptic traditions is negotiated in the lengthy Zostrianos, which, thanks to its relatively well-preserved opening and closing, offers by far the most data. It begins with the eponymous seer reflecting on his circumstances prior to revelation: “I was in the cosmos for the sake of those of my generation and those who would come after me, the living elect…. I preached forcefully about the entirety to those who had alien parts. I tried their works for a little while; thus the necessity of generation brought me into the manifest (world). I was never pleased with them, but always I separated myself from them, since I had come into being through a holy birth.⁵⁷ And being mixed, I straightened my soul, empty of evil.”⁵⁸ Frustrated with his community, he retreats and contemplates metaphysical questions alone, which eventually leads him to despair and a resolve to suicide, when an angel appears and intervenes.⁵⁹ The arrival of revelation to a seer in great emotional distress is common in the Jewish apocalypses.⁶⁰ Then Zostrianos “instantly and exuberantly ascended with the angel, into a great luminous cloud,⁶¹ leaving my shell (πλάσμα) upon the earth, to be guarded by some glories. And [we] were rescued from the whole cosmos, and the thirteen aeons that exist in it, and their angelic beings. They did not spot us, and their ruler (ἄρχων) became disturbed before [our mode of] passage.”⁶² The tradition of the ascent to heaven via cloud is also widespread in Jewish apocalypses.⁶³

      The same is true of the stealthy passage through the clutches of the heavenly powers, which is replicated prior to Zostrianos’s reembodiment at the end of the treatise, after his revelations: “Then, when I came down to the aeons of the [self-begotten] individuals, I received an [image ()] that was pure, yet appropriate for sense-perception (αἴσθησις). I came down to the aeonic copies (ἀντίτυπος) and went to the aetherial earth. And I wrote three wooden tablets (πύξος), leaving them in knowledge ()⁶⁴ for all those who would follow me, the living elect. I came down to the perceptible world and I put on my image (); since it was uneducated, I strengthened it, going around to preach the truth to everybody. Neither the angelic beings of the world nor the archons saw me, for I evaded a myriad of torments which nearly killed me.”⁶⁵ This passage is obscure; it does not identify these steles with the text of Zostrianos itself, so they must be a separate work.⁶⁶ However, writing in heaven was commonly associated in Jewish pseudepigrapha with Enoch’s role as a divine scribe, a role at the root of rabbinic traditions where, transformed into Metatron, he sits in heaven writing. ⁶⁷ Zostrianos probably drew on this tradition, for, like the seer of 2 and 3 Enoch, Zostrianos has been transformed into an angel over the course of his heavenly journey and acquired supra-angelic knowledge.⁶⁸

      Meanwhile, Zostrianos’s descent “invisible and unharmed” past a series of hostile archons is a leitmotiv of apocalyptic, Gnostic, and Manichaean ascent texts. In the Ascension of Isaiah the prophet witnesses the savior’s descent to earth in a disguise, to avoid conflict with malevolent angels.⁶⁹ In a hymnic passage shared between the Apocryphon of John and Trimorphic Protennoia, the figure of Protennoia, a female savior, descends three times.⁷⁰ For Ophites, it is a preexistent Jesus himself who descends.⁷¹ In The Ascension of Isaiah, the descent leads to his crucifixion.⁷² In other texts, he assumes the role of Gnostic initiator, teaching disciples how to navigate the path to heaven by using “seals” or “passwords” to gain power over malevolent archons and angels.⁷³ The Manichaean Psalm-Book also features “wardens” (τελῶναι) whom the ascending soul must pass with the proper verbal offering, as obtained by the descending savior.⁷⁴ In each of these cases, the one who descends is a savior figure.⁷⁵ Zostrianos himself, then, appears to be not merely a seer but a savior, and perhaps even a Christ-figure.⁷⁶ Indeed, the treatise ends with an eschatologically oriented sermon calling its hearers to repent and abandon the body.⁷⁷

      Thus the opening and closing pericopes of Zostrianos, like Allogenes and what is extant of Marsanes, consistently and repeatedly employ stock literary traditions drawn from the apocalypses. It is a way of writing characterized by the acquisition of revelation from a heavenly mediator, a heavenly journey (by cloud), the composition of heavenly books, and paraenetic discourses, in this case concerned with Platonic metaphysics and a cognate ascetic practice. Perhaps most distinctively, it is a way of writing that uses pseudepigraphy to authorize itself, donning the garb of hoary characters of Jewish antiquity to narrate their fantastic heavenly journeys. Not merely the stories that are told but the Sethian storytellers themselves, it seems, presume an audience familiar with and receptive to the world of the Jewish and Christian apocrypha.

      ANOTHER KIND OF STORYTELLER

      Much of our evidence about Sethianism from outside the Nag Hammadi corpus underscores the debt of this literary tradition to the apocalypses, the distinctive kinds of stories they tell, and the distinctive storytellers they are ascribed to. Epiphanius of Salamis’s evidence about the Sethians also shows that they routinely appealed to the authority of Judeo-Christian figures in apocalypses;⁷⁸ moreover, he employs the language of the Platonists to mock them. He claims that the Gnostics (or “Borborites”) “forge (πλάττουσι) many books,” with titles such as Norea, the Gospel of Eve, “books in the name of Seth,” the Apocalypse of Adam, and the Gospel of Philip.79 His Sethians relate a version of the tale of the Nephilim found in Genesis 6:1–4 and the Book of the Watchers. They also “have composed certain books, attributing them to great men (βίβλους δέ τινας συγγράφοντες έξ ὀνόματος μεγάλων ἀνδρῶν): they say there are seven books attributed to Seth; other different books they entitle Foreigners (’Αλλογενεῖς); another they call an Apocalypse Attributed to Abraham (ἐξ ὀνόματος ’Αβραάμ … ἀποκάλυψιν); others attributed to Moses; and others attributed to other figures.”⁸⁰ “The Archontics,” continues Epiphanius, “have forged their own apocrypha (οὗτοι δὲ ὁμοίως βίβλους ἑαυτοίς ἐπλαστογράφησάν τινας ἀποκρύφους),” including books of “the Foreigners” (τοῖς ’Aλλογενέσι καλουμένοις) and an Ascension of Isaiah, probably that known today.⁸¹

      The Archontics also had a tradition about a certain “Marsanios” who was “snatched up” into heaven, as discussed in Chapter 1.⁸² Pistis Sophia in the Askew Codex refers to a revelation dialogue between Jesus and Enoch in Paradise, resulting in the latter’s composition of a book of mysteries, the Books of Jeu (probably those preserved in the Bruce Codex), which is protected by the archon “Kalapatauroth” so that it might survive the deluge.⁸³ In an unfortunately fragmentary passage, the Sethian text Melchizedek mentions Enoch along with Adam and Abel.⁸⁴ Finally, the Cologne Mani Codex⁸⁵ lists several apocalypses, with similar titles, circulating in the community of Mani’s childhood: an “Apocalypse of Adam,” “Apocalypse of Sethel,” “Apocalypse of Enosh,” “Apocalypse of Shem,” and “Apocalypse of Enoch.”⁸⁶ Significantly, the entire catalogue is motivated by the need to recall past revelations, presumably accepted by the target audience, in order to validate the revelations of Mani himself.⁸⁷

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