ABSTRACT
This chapter examines three different types of "Gnostic fiction": novels that employ Gnostic motifs solely as plot devices; novels that offer the prospect of reading as a soteriological activity leading to Gnostic awakening; and examples of speculative fiction. Since the rise of the novel as a popular literary form in the eighteenth century, fiction writers have utilized motifs from "the cultic milieu", a parallel cultural stream opposed to both Christianity and the Enlightenment. Gothic fictions emphasized the Mediterranean Roman Catholic world, including secret societies and exotic beliefs as plot devices. In Gnostic fiction broad themes are more influential than close reading of texts or the use of specific Gnostic doctrines. Knowledge of Gnosticism was fragmentary until the discovery of the Nag Hammadi codices in Egypt in 1945, though Gnostic ideas were preserved in works like Against Heresies. Fictions intended to produce a Gnostic awakening in readers are difficult to identify and rarely popular or widely read.
