The Flood

You already know this story, and in the version you know, the flood is justice. Here it is a cover-up.

Yaldabaoth looks down at the human beings he shaped out of clay and sees them standing straighter than they should, thinking further than he built them to think. There is a light in them, the light he stole from his mother without ever knowing it was hers, and it is waking up. He cannot get it out of them. So he decides to get them out of the world, and calls the water.

The warning that reaches Noah does not come from the maker of the flood. It comes from the Epinoia, the luminous Insight that Sophia hid inside humanity precisely so that it could not be confiscated. Noah builds his ark and is right to, but he is right against the god he thinks he is obeying, and that is the joke the Gnostics are making at the top of their lungs.

And Norea, daughter of Eve, is refused a place on it, and burns it. When the Archons come to take her the way they took her mother, she cries out toward the height, and Eleleth comes down. The seed of Seth is not saved by a boat. It is saved by a cloud of light, and by a woman who would rather burn the vessel than be smuggled aboard the enemy’s salvation.