DeConick A.D

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HELL WALKS AND STAR TREKS
believed themselves to be the only true followers of Jesus, far superior
to the old twelve tribes of Israel and the new thirteenth tribe of false
Christians.
The forging of Sethian identity went in other directions as well. There
is a heap of evidence from the third century that some Sethians began
shaping a more philosophical identity as the best-ever Platonic community.
They wrote their famous trilogy, Allogenes the Stranger, Marsanes,
and Zostrianos, which has survived in fragmented form among the Nag
Hammadi texts. At least Allogenes and Zostrianos (and perhaps Marsanes,
too) were known to the third-century philosopher Plotinus, who operated
a Platonic academy in Rome. Some Sethians, whom Plotinus calls
Gnostics and “friends,” attended his seminary and gave the poor man fits
because of their insistence that the God who created our world is evil and
has bad intentions for us.
The Five Seals
Given these diverse Sethian identities as Gnostic Jews, as the only true
Christians, as the best-ever Platonic philosophers, what can be said about
their initiatory practices? Here we find remarkable stability in terms of
water practices and performances of bodily stillness. Throughout the wide
range of Sethian materials there is agreement that the Five Seals is a Sethian
water rite (Pearson 2011; Turner 2013). The Sethians used combinations
of baptism, anointing, and investiture as initiates traversed the
underworld, celestial, and transcendent realms. These rites were used to
mark the transformation of the spirit or self as it journeyed from the lowest
to the highest of these realms.
Like other Gnostic mysteries, Sethian initiation begins with the awakening
of the spirit in the underworld, when the initiate undergoes the
ceremony of the Five Seals, an underworld water ritual described in our
earliest Sethian sources. In the previous chapter we looked at the liturgy
as it is preserved in the last section of the long version of the Apocryphon
of John (NHC II.1 30.33–31.25), in which the divinity Forethought descends
bodily into Hades and awakens the initiate from deep sleep. After
a liturgical exchange, she seals him five times in a special luminous water
to redeem him from death. These five seals ritually defeat the five underworld
lords referenced earlier in the work (11.6–7).