Before the Demiurge botched the material world, before Sophia made her catastrophic independent decision, before any of the cascading disasters that Gnostic myth uses to explain why existence is the way it is, there was Barbelo — the first emanation of the Invisible Spirit, the divine Mother-Father, the one whose existence preceded every other existence except the one at the top of the hierarchy that is too abstract to be called an existence at all. She is understood as the first self-revelation or ‘thought’ of the Invisible Spirit, which makes her simultaneously the first act of divine self-reflection and the origin of everything that followed, including all the trouble. She is also, depending on which Gnostic text you're reading, a cosmic power, a first principle, a triple-formed divinity who descends through the world three times in different guises, and a figure whose name turns up in magical papyri and on protective amulets. She appears in some of the most important survivi...
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