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

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.