Hypostasis of the Archons 4

1The archons brought Adam and placed him in the garden so that he might tend it and guard it. They commanded him, saying, “You may eat from [all] the trees in the garden, but do not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Do not [touch] it, because on the day you eat from it, you will certainly die.”

2[This] they [said to him], yet they did not understand what [they had said] to him. Instead, it was according to the will of the Father [] that they spoke this way, so that Adam would indeed eat and so that Adam would <not> regard them as a thoroughly material person would.

3The archons plotted with one another and said, “Come, let us cause a deep sleep to fall upon Adam,” and Adam fell asleep. The deep sleep they caused to fall upon him, which he slept, is ignorance. They opened his side, like a living woman. Then they closed his side with flesh in its place, and Adam became merely soulish.

4The spiritual woman approached him and spoke to him, saying, “Arise, Adam.”

5When he looked at her, he said, “You have given me life. You will be called the Mother of the Living, because she is my mother. She is the physician, the woman, the one who has given birth.”

6The authorities approached their Adam. When they saw his female counterpart speaking with him, they became aroused and lusted after her. They said to one another, “Come, let us sow our semen in her,” and they pursued her. She, however, laughed at them because of their stupidity and blindness. As they seized her, she became a tree, and as she placed before them a shadowy likeness of herself, they defiled it most vilely, defiling the signet of her voice. Thus they brought judgment upon themselves by means of the form they had modeled in their own image.