ABSTRACT
Gnosticism' is the modern designation, coined by the English divine, Henry More (1614-87), for a religious movement or movements of late antiquity which claimed to possess a specific and superior type of knowledge, gnosis. Nevertheless, the publication of the most well-preserved and interesting texts such as The Gospel of Truth, evidently Valentinian and echoing Irenaeus' lapidary summary of that form of gnosis, The Apocryphon of John and The Sophia of Jesus Christ, supplementing the information Doresse was able to provide from his cursory examination of the bulk of the Nag Hammadi texts, allowed a major colloquium on the origins of Gnosticism to take place in Messina in 1966. The Gnostic solution is to understand the light power of the Mother present in all humanity as the capacity for salvation, which yet needs the descent of the Father's Holy Spirit in the rite of sealing/chrismation for completion.
