"For I am the first and the last. I am the honored and the scorned. I am the whore and the holy one. I am the wife and the virgin. I am the mother and the daughter." These lines are spoken by a voice that no one has been able to identify with certainty, in a poem found in a jar in the Egyptian desert in 1945. They belong to The Thunder, Perfect Mind , one of the most startling texts of the Nag Hammadi library, and probably one of the most beautiful. The speaker is a woman, a goddess or a divine power. She is made of contradictions, and she speaks them with such force that the reader cannot look away. A Voice from the Jar The Thunder, Perfect Mind is the second text in the sixth codex of the Nag Hammadi find. It survives in Coptic, in a translation from a lost Greek original, and scholars generally place the original in the second or third century CE, though the date is uncertain. It has no clear author and no clear religious home. Unlike many other texts in the collect...