Lux Esoterica (Nifiluz)

In the deserts of Egypt, in remote wadis (dry riverbeds) where the silence is total and the distance from the world complete, monastic communities have been painting sacred images for seventeen centuries. The art they produced — and still produce — is Coptic art : the visual tradition of the Christian Church of Egypt, one of the oldest continuously functioning Christian communities in the world, tracing its founding to the Evangelist Mark who, according to tradition, brought the Gospel to Alexandria around 42 CE. Coptic art is not a minor regional variant of Byzantine or Western Christian art; it is an independent tradition with its own iconographic vocabulary, its own aesthetic principles, and its own theology of the image — a tradition that preserves, in its spare, intense figures and luminous colors, the direct inheritance of the earliest Christian communities of the Mediterranean world. The word "Copt" comes from the Arabic Qibt , which derives from the Greek Aigyptos (...

In December 1945, a peasant farmer named Muhammad Ali al-Samman was digging for fertilizer near the cliffs of Jabal al-Tarif, in upper Egypt, close to the town of Nag Hammadi. His mattock struck something hard: a sealed red earthenware jar, roughly a meter tall. He hesitated before breaking it — there might be a djinn inside, or there might be gold. He broke it. There was no gold. There were thirteen leather-bound papyrus codices, wrapped in leather and remarkably well preserved by the dry Egyptian air. Muhammad Ali brought them home. His mother burned some of the pages as kindling. A local teacher bought one codex for a few Egyptian pounds. Eventually, through a chain of black-market transactions, scholarly intrigue, and Cold War archival politics that reads like a thriller novel, the texts made their way to the Coptic Museum in Cairo. What Muhammad Ali had found was one of the most significant archaeological discoveries of the 20th century: the Nag Hammadi library — a collection o...