AT FIRST GLANCE, the Gnostic texts have much in common with the books of the New Testament. They deploy many of the same characters: Jesus, the twelve apostles, Mother Mary, Mary Magdalene. They grapple with similar themes: sin, salvation, the beginning and end of the world. But when you zoom in, you see a world that is darker and bleaker, a dystopia of ignorance, alienation and corruption. As the Gnostics would have it, most people drift through life in a dream state, blind to the constructed nature of reality and enslaved by the deception. This counterfeit world, in the Gnostic telling, was
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