ABSTRACT
One of the most stunning appropriations of the sensuous imagery of the myth of Eros can be found in the Gnostic text On the Origin of the World, which will serve as the focal point of the present investigation of the Gnostic revision of “making”. The Psyche of Apuleius’s tale, who desires to pour light on her unseen lover, loses him, but that moment marks the beginning of her initiation into the realm of Aphrodite, the mother of love and primal mistress of flowing waters. In both of these pictures of the loving of the Aphroditic soul, Plotinus emphasizes the dynamic and productive qualities of love. Gnostic texts about making, which are also about the inner dynamics of the divine world, speak a poetry of the body that has few rivals in late antiquity. As Plotinus remarked, myths “must separate in time” things that fundamentally belong together because of the constraints of the narrative form of myths.
