An ancient religious movement that evolved out of nascent Jewish and Christian sects in the late 1st century A.D. Gnosticism is a very subversive set of ideas, and it's distantly related to other Abrahamic mystical traditions like Kabbalah, but was suppressed by the early orthodox Christians and Jews as a perversion of their beliefs.
Basically, Gnostics read the first chapters of Genesis in a very different way than is traditional, seeing the serpent that tempted Adam and Eve as good and viewing the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil as humanities first step into consciousness.
Because of this, Gnosticism posits that the god of the Hebrew Bible, Yahweh, is actually an evil
bastard child of the lowest aeon called Sophia (Greek for "Wisdom") who disobeyed the higher aeons and fell from grace.
Gnostic cosmogonies are complex and convoluted and very diverse across different movements, but a basic
description of it would be that basically Yahweh and his archons (Greek for "rulers") created the physical world and rule
over it, trapping our souls within it to keep us from the light world, the world which is ruled by the aeons and a Supreme God who is fundamentally good and who possesses both masculine and feminine hypostases.
Many Gnostics believe this good God is the God of
the New Testament and they generally regard Jesus as a savior who came into the world to rescue a fallen Sophia and bring humanity back into the light world through knowledge.
Person 1: Wow! Did you hear about the
discovery of the Nag Hammadi library?
Person 2: No,
what does it contain?
Person 1: It contains a bunch of ancient books from Gnosticism!
