House Research

While living encounter with ancient texts is a key focus of House of Divine Radiance, these embodied experiences can only be undergirded by a rigorous program of academic inquiry.

As host of the House, I maintain a research program in a few key areas where Israelite Temple Mysticism, Jewish Apocalypticism, and Gnostic Christianities intersect one another.

The Architecture of Ascent

My current research explores the cosmologies of heavenly ascent in late antique Egypt, with particular attention to the "gnostic" texts known as Pistis Sophia and the Books of Jeu.

These extraordinary Coptic texts are among the first of the "gnostic" Christian texts to return to the public view, but paradoxically are also the least studied. Together, they are concerned with the structure of the heavens, the passage of the soul through celestial realms, and the ritual knowledge required to move between them.

These texts preserve elaborate worlds of treasuries, gates, watchers, passwords, seals, names, numbers, diagrams, light-realms, powers, and celestial journeys. Yet they did not emerge from an intellectual vacuum.

My work asks what becomes visible when we read their heavenly architectures within the much longer history of ascent traditions surrounding them: ancient Near Eastern cosmologies, Jewish apocalyptic literature, early Christianity, and the developing ritual and visionary worlds often gathered under the broad designation of “Gnosticism.”

The Pistis Sophia & Books of Jeu

The Pistis Sophia and Books of Jeu belong to a remarkable body of Coptic literature preserved in Egypt and associated with communities of late antique Christians whose cosmologies extended far beyond the familiar heaven-and-earth map of later Christianity.

The Books of Jeu, in particular, present an astonishingly technical celestial universe. The initiate encounters a succession of heavenly treasuries and their inhabitants, learning the names, seals and ritual signs necessary for passage. The surviving manuscript even preserves complex diagrams that appear not merely to illustrate the text, but to participate in its ritual technology.

Rather than approaching these materials primarily as collections of "strange doctrines," I am interested in them as literatures of navigation. This naturally entails questions such as:

● What kind of universe did their authors believe human beings inhabited?

● What did it mean to ascend through it?

● Why were gates, guardians, names and signs necessary?

● What earlier traditions of heavenly travel might stand behind these systems?

● Perhaps most importantly, what happens when such texts are brought into conversation with Jewish apocalyptic and ascent literature, and earlier Mesopotamian cosmologies (rather than treated only within the realms of Egyptian spirituality or the later taxonomies of Christian heresiology)?

From Apocalypticism to Ascent Mysticism

This research follows a thread running through texts and traditions in which the heavens are not simply a destination after death. They are structured territories that can be encountered, traversed and known.

That thread leads through ancient Near Eastern celestial cosmologies, the ascent journeys of Jewish apocalyptic literature, early Christian visionary traditions, and eventually into the extraordinarily elaborate heavens of texts such as the Pistis Sophia and Books of Jeu.

I am particularly interested in recurring structures: gates and gatekeepers; multiple heavens or celestial regions; passwords and secret names; angelic or divine guides; transformation of the visionary; ritual preparation; celestial liturgy; and the relationship between knowledge and passage.

These continuities raise larger questions about what late antique Christians inherited, transformed, and reimagined from the religious worlds around them.

Researching These Texts in Egypt

I undertake this work while living in Cairo and studying Coptic, placing me in an unusual relationship with the material.

Egypt is not simply the modern location from which I happen to read these manuscripts. It is the landscape in which these texts were copied, preserved, buried, discovered and transmitted to us.

The surviving Books of Jeu are preserved in Coptic. Pistis Sophia survives in Coptic but may have been translated from the earlier Greek. Both manuscripts came to light in the 18th century, long before their more famous counterparts from the same Egyptian landscape—the extraordinary library of early Christian and Gnostic literature at Nag Hammadi.

Though the original provenance of Pistis Sophia and the Books of Jeu is unknown, and both simply "appeared" in Europe in the 1700s, we do know that both are gifts to us from the Egyptian desert, in terms of both culture and preservation.

It is my joy to live and work in proximity to this same desert, which I regard as both a partner and friend in the process of giving voice to the Living Wisdom of these ancestors.

The deserts that became home to generations of Christian ascetics are not abstractions to me; they belong to the physical and religious geography in which I now live and work.

This does not collapse the historical distance between modern Egypt and late antiquity. It does, however, create a distinctive form of situated research: scholarship conducted while learning the language of the surviving texts and inhabiting the landscape through which their manuscript history has come down to us.

A Living Research Project

This is ongoing work rather than a finished thesis.

I am interested precisely in the places where the map remains incomplete: neglected texts, unexplored relationships, strange diagrams, unresolved cosmologies, and questions that have remained at the margins.

Perhaps my greatest joy in the material is precisely that it is difficult, technical, and resistant to familiar categories. Perhaps more so, because most scholars avoid these two manuscripts in particular. I admit, I have always had a habit of running toward what others might avoid.

Through Magdalene Merkabah, and to a lesser extent my YouTube Channel, I will share parts of this research as it develops: close readings of texts, explorations of celestial cosmology, translations and Coptic study, manuscript observations, comparative research, and longer essays tracing the ancient traditions of ascent that may illuminate these extraordinary works.

Through it all, my central question is deceptively simple:

What did it mean, in these ancient worlds, to know the way through heaven?

And from there, an entire cosmos opens.