On a far block of the city there is a temple, and this is the inside of it. The floor is the Ophite diagram, the one gnostic chart that survives, and only because Origen described it in order to argue with it. Round the floor stand sixteen signs, with the Monad in the middle: Abraxas and the serpent that eats its tail, the thirty aeons and the seven heavens, the Tree and the Tetraktys, a Mandaean standard and John Dee's figure of everything. Point at one and it comes to the middle, with what it means. Through the back of the nave is the library: fifty-odd gnostic, hermetic, kabbalistic, magical and mystical texts, every one a link to a free copy, every one older than copyright, which is the only kind of old a library like this can afford.
Each is drawn from its description, as line art, the way the city and the backrooms are drawn; none is traced from a gem or a manuscript, so what you see is what the sources say and no more. The explanations are short and, as far as the sources allow, true; where a thing is disputed, it says so, and where everyone says a thing that is not so, it says that too.
A circle with a point in it. The Pythagoreans' sign for the One, from which the numbers and then everything else proceed; the Hermetic books call the first thing Mind; the Valentinians called it Bythos, the Depth, and said nothing else about it, which was the point. Everything else in this room is a complication of this.
The serpent that eats its tail. It is drawn in the alchemical papyrus of Cleopatra, third-century Alexandria, round the words hen to pan, the all is one. The Ophites and the Pistis Sophia put it round the world as the outer darkness: the disc of the world sits inside the serpent's ring, and so do you. It is also the sign for a process that feeds on itself, which is how it came to be on the covers of chemistry books.
A cock's head, a man's body in armour, two serpents for legs, a whip in one hand and a shield in the other. Cut into thousands of gemstones in the second and third centuries, and named for the ruler of the 365 heavens in Basilides' system: the Greek letters of ΑΒΡΑΣΑΞ add up to 365. Jung wrote seven sermons about him and signed them Basilides; Hesse put him in Demian. He is also where the word abracadabra does not come from, though everyone says so.
The three vowels on the gems beside Abraxas: the Greek spelling of the name of the God of the Jews, which some gnostics took as the name of one archon among seven. Irenaeus lists them: Ialdabaoth, Iao, Sabaoth, Adonaios, Eloaios, Horaios, Astaphaios. The seven vowels ΑΕΗΙΟΥΩ ring it, one for each planet, chanted in order as the password past each heaven, which is why the magical papyri are full of lines that look like someone leaning on the keyboard.
A serpent with a lion's head, rayed with seven or twelve rays, over a sign of three S's struck through. On the gems it is against pains of the stomach. In the Apocryphon of John the same figure is Ialdabaoth, the Demiurge, lion-faced and serpentine, who made this world without asking anyone and believes there is no god above him. He is wrong, which is the whole of gnosticism in a sentence.
Celsus saw one around the year 178 and used it against the Christians; Origen answered him sixty years later with a better description of it; between them we have the only gnostic chart that survives, in words. Two circles in the middle, Father and Son, bound by a ring called Love; seven circles for the archons' heavens, each with its name and its password; and round everything the Leviathan, the world-serpent, the soul of all. It is the floor of this room. It is a map of what you have to climb out of.
Valentinus' Fullness: thirty aeons in fifteen pairs, male and female, emanating from the Depth and Silence in an Ogdoad of eight, a Decad of ten and a Dodecad of twelve. The last and youngest is Sophia, Wisdom, who wanted to know the Depth by herself, could not, and whose grief, falling out of the circle, became the stuff of this world. Irenaeus wrote the whole system down to mock it, and thereby saved it.
The Limit, also called Stauros, the Cross: the boundary the Valentinians drew round the Pleroma to keep the Fullness in and the fall out. Sophia's intention is kept inside the ring; her passion is put outside it, where it becomes the Demiurge and the world we are in. The cross was a fence before it was anything else.
Two equal circles, each drawn through the other's centre, and the almond where they overlap. The shape of a fish, a seed, a gate; the first thing you draw in Euclid, and the first thing the cathedral builders drew for a window. The mystics put the Christ in it because it is where two worlds share an area without being the same world.
One, two, three, four, in a triangle: ten points. The Pythagoreans swore their oaths by it. It holds the point, the line, the plane and the solid, and the ratios of the octave, the fifth and the fourth, 2:1, 3:2, 4:3, so it is geometry and music at once, which was the claim. Mead's Hermes and the Kabbalists' Tree are both ways of counting to ten and meaning everything.
Two triangles, one up, one down, interlaced. The hexagram; the Seal of Solomon on the grimoires; the alchemists' fire and water; and the sentence from the Emerald Tablet that the whole Hermetic tradition rests on: that which is below is like that which is above, for the working of the one thing. The sentence is the method. The figure is the sentence, drawn.
Ten sephiroth, the emanations of the Kabbalah, in three columns, joined by twenty-two paths, one for each Hebrew letter, as the Sefer Yetzirah counts them: thirty-two paths of wisdom in all. Kether at the top is the Crown; Malkuth at the bottom is this. It is the Pleroma's diagram, drawn by people who kept the books.
A cross of two olive-wood staves, draped with a white cloth, with a myrtle wreath at the crossing: the standard of the Mandaeans of Iraq and Iran, the only gnostic religion still practised. It is not a crucifix. The cloth is the light, and the four arms are the four quarters of the world the light shines through. They baptise in running water on Sundays, hold John the Baptist for a prophet and Jesus for not one, and they are still here, which none of the rest of this room can say.
John Dee's figure of 1564: a point in a circle for the Sun, a crescent above it for the Moon, a cross beneath for the four elements, and two arcs at the foot for Aries, fire. Dee claimed every sign of the planets and metals could be cut out of it and wrote the Monas Hieroglyphica to prove it in twenty-four theorems, which Elizabeth asked him to explain to her, and which nobody has entirely understood since, Dee included.
From the Hymn of the Pearl in the Acts of Thomas: a prince is sent from the East down into Egypt to fetch one pearl from the coils of a serpent, puts on the Egyptians' clothes, eats their food, forgets who he is, and sleeps; a letter from home, flying as an eagle, wakes him. The pearl is the soul, the serpent is the world, the letter is gnosis. It is the whole doctrine as a story a child could follow, which was the idea.
Seven arcs for the seven planets' heavens, which the archons keep, and an eighth beyond them, the sphere of the fixed stars, which is the first place that is free. The Hermetic Discourse on the Eighth and Ninth teaches the climb to it; the Valentinians' Sophia waits there for the rest of us. Above the seventh, in every version of the story, the rules change.
Sulphur, mercury and salt: Paracelsus' three principles, soul, spirit and body, in the signs the alchemists cut for them: a triangle on a cross, a circle crowned with a crescent on a cross, a circle with a bar through it. Mercury's sign is the one Dee cut his Monad from. Not elements, in their view, but what anything is made of in three different ways at once, and the reason a thing can burn, run and stay.
Every book on these shelves is in the public domain in the United States, and most of them everywhere: the translations are the Victorian and Edwardian ones, Mead's and Mathers' and Legge's and Budge's, made for the theosophists and the Golden Dawn and the Sacred Books of the East, and they are the reason the texts are free. Each link goes to a complete copy, at Project Gutenberg where it has one, otherwise at the Gnostic Society Library, the Esoteric Archives, New Advent, the Internet Archive, or the Internet Sacred Text Archive. Nothing is hosted here. The shelf notes are mine.
What is not here: the Nag Hammadi codices, found in a jar in 1945, whose English translations are younger than the copyright term; the Gnostic Society Library keeps them by arrangement. What the heresy-hunters quoted in order to refute is here, because they hated it carefully.
Drawn on a canvas, no library, in one script; the signs and the shelves are plain HTML and read the same without it. The explanations are short and mine; the sources are the shelf, and the shelf is where to disagree with them. The temple is a block in the city, where the hierophant will ask whether you have been.