T
his concluding portion of the long Sethian text Zostrianos provides a fine example of a gnostic sermon. The figure named Zostrianos was said to have been an older relative (perhaps a grandfather or uncle) of the Persian religious teacher Zoroaster, or Zarathustra, the founder of the Zoroastrian religion. Zoroaster himself is mentioned, along with Zostrianos, in the set of cryptographic titles and descriptions after the conclusion of the text. Revelations by Zostrianos and Zoroaster are also referred to by Porphyry in his Life of Plotinos
as texts known to neoplatonists, and Porphyry claims that Plotinos’s student Amelios wrote as many as forty volumes refuting the book of Zostrianos.
Although the text of Zostrianos is poorly preserved and in fragmentary condition, parts of the text are quite legible, including the beginning, where the author, writing in the name of Zostrianos, recounts his call. Once he was in the desert, meditating on deep questions, when he grew profoundly depressed, to the point of contemplating suicide. Suddenly an angel appears to him, “the angel of the knowledge of the eternal light,” and this angel guides Zostrianos in an out-of-the-body journey up through the heavenly realms. As he ascends, Zostrianos is baptized at the various stages of ascent into the knowledge of the divine. After a series of revelatory experiences, in which Zostrianos learns about the meaning of the universe and the divine realms, which are populated with the usual Sethian characters, Zostrianos returns down to
this world and his body. Now enlightened, Zostrianos preaches the impassioned gnostic sermon given here, in order to awaken lost people to saving knowledge.
The text of Zostrianos survives in Coptic in the Nag Hammadi library. It was composed in Greek some time before it became known, in the latter half of the third century, to Plotinos and his students. Despite the suggestion that the text tells the story of the Persian sage Zostrianos, the text is a pseudonymous composition, and its actual place of composition is unknown.