DeConick A.D

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PLEASANTVILLE RELIGIONS
revealing the secret twenty-four-level passage through the cosmos to the
thirteenth realm. These are the lesser mysteries that chart the path of the
soul up to the gates of the treasuries of light. The other Jesus moment
that mattered to the Jeuians is Jesus’ ascension. It is remembered as a
very specific day and time in the calendar, suggesting that the Jeuians
celebrated Jesus’ ascension as a religious festival, keeping an overnight
vigil of silence on January 24, known in their calendar as the fifteenth
day of the month of Töbe (Pistis Sophia 1.2–3). The vigil started when
the moon was full and the sun was at its zenith. The Jeuians thought that
Jesus’ ascension was initiated by the final descent of the Jesus of Light,
which engulfed the person Jesus in power and luminosity. The vigil ended
the next day, at the ninth hour, when they believed that Jesus’ ascension
to the kingdom of light had been completed. They thought that Jesus,
united with the Jesus of Light, had ascended to the very highest treasuries.
Then he returned to earth to reveal to his followers the greater mysteries
of the ineffable realms.
In the second century CE, the Jeuians emerged as a new Gnostic
movement, an Egyptian solar cult whose mysteries were revealed by the
Jesus of the fourth Gospel, but only after his resurrection. The focus of
the movement was to provide initiates with the information, rites, and experiences
needed to ascend safely through the star gates to the innermost
realm, where Jeu, their solar God, resided.
A hundred years after its founding, there was a marked shift in Jeuian
cosmology and theology, perhaps under the pressure of competition with
Sethians who claimed to have a better religion, featuring an ineffable trinity
of gods in a transcendent realm. To compete, the Jeuians transposed
their solar mysteries to a transcendent realm and developed lower mysteries
to assist the souls of the deceased in evading horrible purgatory realms
before entering the light treasuries, now the ineffable world of Jeu and his
father. The Sethian deities become little more than demons in a liminal
realm below the world of light.
Mandaean Memories
The third century witnessed the birth of a number of Gnostic movements
that consolidated into new popular religions. Yet the Sethian separatists,
the followers of Mani, and the transposed solar cult of Jeu did not survive