The Thunder, Perfect Mind

"I am the first and the last. I am the honored and the scorned. I am the whore and the holy. I am the wife and the virgin." The Thunder, Perfect Mind is a second century Coptic poem preserved in Nag Hammadi Codex VI. In the poem, a divine feminine voice speaks in paradoxes, identifying with exalted qualities (e.g., “I am wisdom,” “I am the wife and the virgin”) and their opposites (“I am ignorance,” “I am the whore”). Since its publication, the poem has gained prominence not only among scholars of early Christianity and Gnosticism but also in contemporary literature, art, and spirituality, precisely because of its enigmatic, inclusive, and paradoxically affirming voice. Excerpted in Kids (movie, 1995) and in Toni Morrison's novel Paradise (1997), this poem is an invitation to find the divine in the most unexpected of places: in the poor and the rich, the honored and the scorned, and even within the chaos of your own contradictory heart. In a world where the divine is often a silent, distant patriarch, a feminine voice unites all opposites. The speaker is not a masculine, singular God but a divine feminine force of nature. Listen now, and hear a voice excluded from mainstream Christianity for millennia.