What Sort of Thing Is This Luminous Woman?: Thinking Sexual Difference in On the Origin of the World

Abstract

This article explores the etiology of human sexual difference presented in On the Origin of the World . The Nag Hammadi text articulates sexually- differentiated human subjectivity through a set of complex hermeneutical negotiations based on readings of the “image” and “likeness” of Genesis 1.26. After the archons’ creation of Adam, the origin of sexual difference is explained through a counter-narrative of creation. Here Sophia models Eve on a different “image” and “likeness” than that used by the archons to create Adam. The result is an anthropological vision in which the sexual division is a primary one, rooted in two processes of creation that interweave the luminosity of the divine realm into the primordial male and female human beings in two distinct and inassimilable ways.

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