The Gospel of Eve

may be the same as "The Gospel of Perfection", but both are lost, so we cannot know.

As so often, we have to rely on quotations in Epiphanius' "Panarion", and his comments there that the Borborites used the text to justify free love. This they did, or so he claimed, by practicing coitus interruptus and eating semen as a religious act - the former reminiscent of the sin of Onan in the Tanach (Genesis 38) which Epiphanius, quite correctly, regarded as coitus interruptus and not as masturbation; the latter reminiscent of the pagan practices of the hierodules of Astarte, for whom the modern word "bukkake" has been coined to describe the practice of eating semen (the word literally means "splashing" and was invented for the cooking of noodles in Japan, but that is by the by).

Gnostics generally regarded the flesh as intrinsically evil, but divided into two schools of thought on how to deal with it: the libertine Gnostics chose to acknowledge it by freely engaging in sexual acts; the majority negated it altogether by practicing asceticism.

One of the verses quoted by Epiphanius reads:

"I stood on a lofty mountain and saw a gigantic man, and another, a dwarf; and I heard as it were a voice of thunder, and drew nigh for to hear; and He spake unto me and said: I am thou, and thou art I; and wheresoever thou mayest be I am there. In all am I scattered, and whencesoever thou willest, thou gatherest Me; and gathering Me, thou gatherest Thyself." (Epiphanius, Hæres., xxvi. 3.

Precisely how this gets to be a verse about coitus interruptus and bukkake is difficult to discern, though Epiphanius helps by interjecting a parenthesis after the word "scattered" - "[that is, the Logos as seed or 'members']". But even this may not resolve the matter, for the scattering of the Logos, in the creational sense of John the Evangelist, would be little different from a description of the creation of the universe by Ouranos in the earliest Greek myth, where he spills his seed across the emptiness of space, germinating stars and planets in the process, until the risk of over-population inspired his son Chronos to castrate him.

Epiphanius may just have been taking the image literally, when it was intended metaphorically; or he may simply, like so many early, and indeed later Christians, have suffered from an unhealthy phobia about sex.

A second quotation is weighed down with the same burden. Citing "I saw a tree bearing twelve manner of fruits every year, and he said unto me, This is the tree of life", Epiphanius concludes that this represents that other terrible abomination, the menstrual cycle, whereas a glance at Revelation 22:2 makes clear it is simply a quotation from a canonical work:

"In the midst of the street of it, and on either side of the river, there was the Tree of Life, which bore twelve kinds of fruit and yielded her fruit every month; and the leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations." 

Unless menstruation has healing properties, Epiphanius has definitely missed the point this time.

Though the case has been made here sarcastically, it also acknowledges that the Na'assenes (see the note in the Greek Gospel of the Egyptians), understood the scattering to be "the seeds disseminated into the cosmos from the Inexpressible, by means of which the whole cosmos is consummated." Where this commentary has referenced this with Ouranos, they did the same with the myths of Osher (Osiris) and Dionysus, as does "The Gospel of Philip", which Epiphanius quotes in the same chapter:

"I recognised myself, and gathered myself together from all sides; I sowed no children for the ruler, but I tore up his roots, and gathered together [my] limbs that were scattered abroad; I know thee who thou art, for I am from the realms above". 

Remembering that Gnosticism owes much to the religions of India (see my page on "The Gospel of Scythianus"), we should also note that semen retention is much practiced among the Buddhists.

The Borborites, mentioned above, were also known as the Koddians, in Egypt as the Phibionites, and elsewhere as the Barbalites, Secundians and occasionally Socratites, though, as that last link states unequivocally, Epiphanius may actually have made some of these up as a device for frightening the authorities into declaring them all as heresies, based in the belief that so many groups inferred a vast proliferation of these ideas, when in reality there were probably very few accolytes at all.

Epiphanius may also have chosen their pseudonyms for the same reason. The name Borborites, for example, comes from the Greek word for "mud", which is not a name that anyone is going to choose for themselves, so we can assume it was applied to them by their detractors, who liked to picture them wallowing in it literally as well as metaphorically. The Koddians, to restore their own name for themselves, were libertines, not in the ultra-conservative sense that the word is used in modern America to describe a person who cannot distinguish self-entitlement from human rights, and believes that he knows who John Galt was (that's a Libertarian), but rather in the sense of the Marquis de Sade and other voluptuaries, practicing free love like Merry Pranksters at Woodstock (this is "The Gospel of Eve" after all, so fertility rites should be expected!).

The church fathers detested them to such a puritanical degree that we cannot possibly take at face value their description of the Borborite practices, which, in addition to the above-mentioned, also included the smearing of hands with menstrual blood, and semen as a form of libation, and the consumption of the same emissions as a variant on the Eucharist (is that a mysogynistic equivalent of the anti-Semitic "Blood Libel"?). They were also charged with extracting foetuses from pregnant women in order to consume them, particularly if the women accidentally became pregnant during related sexual rituals (maybe that's who killed little Hugh of Lincoln?). They are not charged with using Christian babies to make communion wafers, nor is there an assertion that Judas Iscariot was a secret Borborite who also ran a bank at high levels of interest and always demanded his thirty-shekel bond, but we are in a similar realm of derogation, myth-making and general phobia. The Borborites were often confused with the Sethians, for whom see The Holy Book of the Great Invisible Spirit.

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