📜 Authorship, Transmission, and Translation
The Hypostasis of the Archons, also known as The Reality of the Rulers, is a mythological and exegetical text preserved in Codex II of the Nag Hammadi Library. Written in Coptic, it offers an alternative interpretation of creation and authority, drawing on Jewish, Christian, and Gnostic symbolic traditions.
This edition is translated by Willis Barnstone and Marvin Meyer and published in The Gnostic Bible (Shambhala / HarperCollins, 2003). It is reproduced here for educational and comparative study under fair use. All rights remain with the original translators and publishers.
The Hypostasis of the Archons (Codex II, 4) reveals the mythic foundation of Gnostic cosmology. It recounts how the Archons — rulers of the material heavens — sought to dominate creation, and how Sophia, through compassion, intervened to restore the divine image within humanity.
This text reimagines Genesis as an occult battle between ignorance and remembrance, exposing the false creators who shaped the visible world. It is both a myth of resistance and a manual of awakening — the defiance of spirit against the machinery of matter.