Notes on Higher Consciousness from “Beyond Belief” by Elaine Pagels
Adam and Eve – Eve as epinoia. From The Secret Book:
… a “helper” – luminous epinoia ["creative" or "inventive" consciousness] which comes out of him, who is called Life [Eve]; and she “helps” the whole creation, by working with him, and by restoring him to his full being, and by teaching him about the descent of his kind, and by showing the way to ascend, the way he came down.”
- Apocryphon of John 20:15-25, in NHL 110.
Eve symbolizes spiritual understanding, a way to reflect upon divine reality.
From On the Origin of the World:
“…they saw that they were naked of spiritual understanding [gnosis].” The luminous epinoia “appeared to them shining with light, and awakened their consciousness.”
- On the Origin of the World 108-118, in NHL 167-174
The Secret Book uses a number of words from the Greek verb noein – “perceive,” “think”, or “be aware.”
The powers that reveal God to human kind include:
- Pronoia – anticipatory awareness
- Ennoia – internal reflection
- Prognosis – foreknowledge or intuition
- Epinoia – genuine insight, imagination (not fantasy), conscious awareness
All are personified as feminine presences.
The insights that the luminous epinoia conveys “are neither complete nor certain; instead epinoia conveys hunts and glimpses, images and stories, that imperfectly point beyond themselves towards what we cannot now fully understand. [...] as Paul says, we know only ‘In a mirror, darkly.’”
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