Barbelo

Barbelo is the first emanation and principal female or androgynous power of the Invisible Spirit in Sethian Gnostic cosmology, most fully described in the Apocryphon of John, a Sethian text surviving in four Nag Hammadi manuscripts and one Berlin Gnostic Codex. When the Invisible Spirit looks upon the light-water surrounding it, Barbelo comes forth as its Forethought, Pronoia, and its perfect image or self-reflection, called the Mother-Father because she contains both begetting principles, and the Thrice-Male on account of the three powers, will, thought and foreknowledge, the text ascribes to her. At her request the Invisible Spirit grants her Foreknowledge, Incorruptibility and Eternal Life as further emanations beside her, and from her union with the Invisible Spirit's own reflected light comes the Self-Originate, Autogenes, identified with Christ, who in turn generates the remaining lights and powers of the Sethian Pleroma. Barbelo belongs to a wholly separate system from the Valentinian Pleroma; the two traditions share the vocabulary of emanation and, in places, the term Aeon, but their genealogies do not correspond figure for figure. The name itself has no settled etymology: proposed derivations from Coptic, Hebrew and Aramaic phrases have all been argued in the modern literature without producing a scholarly consensus.