DeConick A.D

90
SUPERPOWERS AND MONSTERS
We have known you, true life of life, the womb pregnant with all-coming-to-be.
We have known you, who persist eternally
By conceiving all-coming-to-be in its perfect fullness.
Worshipping with this entire prayer the good of your goodness,
We ask only this:
That you wish us to persist in the love of your knowledge
And that we never be cut off from such a life as this.
The Hermetics believed that, once they reestablished the connection
with the all-lord through prayer and praise, their ritual commendation
could be extended to earthly kings as well. As in heaven, so on earth,
they thought. Prayers and praises offered for their political rulers would
realign the earthly kingships with the peace and goodness of the supreme
God—or so they hoped (Corpus Hermeticum XVIII.8–16).
The Hermetics performed their prayers to the all-lord and the kings
twice daily on temple grounds: at sunrise, facing east, and at sunset, facing
south. Following the evening prayer, they ate a communal vegetarian
meal. At their sacred meal, they refused to consume “living things”
because they did not wish to harm even the irrational souls of the beasts,
which too were undulations of the One and All (Asclepius 41 [Latin]).
Biblical Gnosticism and the Sethians
At the same time that the pagan pathway of Gnostic spirituality was forming
in the Nile delta and developing Hermetic conventicles, a second pathway
of Gnostic spirituality was absorbing the Bible. At first, these biblical
Gnostics were only concerned with revisiting Jewish scriptures in light of
the Gnostic innovation in spirituality that had begun in Egypt. This was at
a time before the composition of the Christian scriptures. These first biblical
Gnostics, with their focus on integrating Jewish scripture with Gnostic
spirituality, developed into a coherent religious movement, complete with
its own unique mythology, ritual, and communal identity.
Although we do not know where their first community emerged geographically,
whether in Alexandria, the Jordan valley, or the region of
the Euphrates, we do know that they called themselves the Children of