A Lexicon of Gnostic Mythologumena

Basic data for this project

Description

The "Lexicon of Gnostic Mythologumena" will offer above all a reference work for the study of "Gnostic" writings that facilitates the study of the mythological elements in their context. The goal is an inventory of the individual mythological elements that one meets in these writings. The lexicon is analytic and does not aim in the first instance for a synthesis, although it should facilitate possible later synthetic studies. In addition to the lexicon as such, there will also be a thematically organized "Concordance". The alphabetically arranged lemmata of the lexicon include also references to the data that are treated in thematic relationsips in the concordance. Thus the lexicon can be used also as an index to the concordance. The corpus will comprise the (non-Hermetic) texts from the Nag Hammadi Codices, the other known "Gnostic" codices (Berolinensis Gnosticus, Codex Askewianus, Codex Brucianus, Codex Tchachos), and the the Greek and Latin patristic-heresiological sources. It is not intended to construct a kind of genealogy of the "Gnostic" myths. The starting point is the mythological elements as the occur in the transmitted texts. There will be no attempt to recover an "original unity" or some "Urmythos" that was ater reworked. Because no existing (ancient or modern) "heresiological" classification is presupposed in this project, but rather the textual elements are organized according to their literary agreements and variations, this lexicon should contribute to expanding the discussion about the classification of the "Gnostic" material from a new perspective.