Fate: Condemned in Plotinus’s Against the Gnostics (a rare pagan attack) and by Porphyry. Christian Sethians condemned by Epiphanius. The Nag Hammadi library is largely Sethian: Apocryphon of John, Gospel of the Egyptians, Three Steles of Seth, Zostrianos, Allogenes, Hypsiphrone.

Sethian Gnosticism is one of the two major Gnostic schools (with Valentinianism) identified by modern scholars. It centers on Seth, the third son of Adam, as the father of the spiritual race of humanity — those who carry the divine spark. The Apocryphon of John presents the most complete Sethian cosmogony: the supreme invisible Spirit, the divine Barbelo (a feminine divine figure), and the self-generated Christ; the arrogant demiurge Yaldabaoth (equated with the God of Genesis) who creates the material world and falsely declares ‘I am a jealous God, there is no other god beside me’ — which Sethians read as an admission that other gods exist. Sethians had complex baptismal rituals involving five seals. Some Sethian texts show little or no Christian content, suggesting the tradition may predate Christianity or develop in parallel.

What happens when a group is declared heretical: The process is rarely sudden. It typically begins with episcopal letters condemning a teaching, escalates to synodal condemnation at a regional council, and — after Constantine — can be ratified by an ecumenical council backed by imperial authority. Once condemned: (1) Leaders are excommunicated, exiled, or — in later centuries — handed to secular authorities for execution. (2) Writings are ordered burned; possession becomes a criminal offense. Eusebius records that after Nicaea, Constantine ordered Arian books destroyed under penalty of death. The same logic applied to Gnostic texts — which is why the Nag Hammadi library was buried in a sealed jar around 367 AD, the same year Athanasius’s Easter letter listed the NT canon and ordered non-canonical books removed from churches. (3) Communities are dissolved by force where state power reaches; in regions beyond imperial reach they survive for centuries. (4) Memory is controlled — the only surviving accounts of most heresies are hostile summaries by their opponents (Irenaeus, Tertullian, Epiphanius’s Panarion), meaning we are largely reading prosecution briefs, not the groups’ own self-understanding.