A landmark work of scholarship and literary translation, this volume presents the most significant and beautiful sacred texts of gnostic mysticism. The gnostics were religions thinkers who believed that salvation is found through mystical knowledge and personal religious experience. Dating from the first to the 13th centuries, the selections represent Jewish, Christian, Hermetic, Mandaean, Manichaean, Islamic, and Cathar forms of gnostic spirituality; their diverse sources, from Egypt and Rome to China and France, reveal gnosticism as a world religion.