The Paraphrase Of Shem - Overview and Discussion

Of all fifty-two texts buried at Nag Hammadi, none is wilder than the Paraphrase of Shem. It opens with Noah’s son Shem lifted out of his body in a trance, where a mysterious revealer named Derdekeas unveils a cosmos built from three primal roots — Light, Darkness, and the Spirit caught between them — and tells a creation story so vivid and unsettling it reads like a dream on fire: a Darkness that churns like a womb, a Flood that was never God’s mercy, and a baptism that the demon powers themselves designed. No Jesus, no Sophia, no Yaldabaoth — this is Gnosis from a wholly different stream, an echo of what scholars think may be one of the oldest surviving visions of the Gnostic myth. Join The us as we walk through this fierce, hypnotic text slide by slide, decode its strange cast of powers, and ask the question it leaves burning: if the world was made in the dark, where does the Light actually come from? All are welcome; no prior reading required. A link to the text can be found here: http://www.gnosis.org/naghamm/para_shem.html