The Thought of Norea is the second tractate of Codex IX from the Nag Hammadi Library.
The text, consisting of just four paragraphs, is an ode to Norea, one of the emanations in Gnostic cosmology. Norea has several identities within Gnosticism: she can be Eve’s daughter and Seth’s wife and sister, or she can be Noah or Shem’s wife.
In the Nature of the Rulers, Norea, the virgin daughter of Eve, represents the lower Sophia who is yet to be delivered from her deficiency. Here she burns the ark that the evil creator (demiurge) commanded Noah to build.
In the Thought of Norea she represents Sophia, the ‘fallen’ divine Wisdom, who will be restored along with her spiritual progeny in to the divine world by the same aeons from which she departed. She exemplifies the journey of the soul to acquire the divine knowledge necessary for salvation.
The Thought of Norea opens with an invocation of the ‘Father of the All’ and his glorious comrades (cf the familiar trinity of the Father, Mother and the Son).
Norea cries out to them for aid:
“Father of the All,
Thought of light,
Mind dwelling on high,
Above the regions below,
voice of truth,
upright Mind,
unattainable Word (logos),
ineffable voice,
incomprehensible Father!”
Like Sophia (wisdom) in other gnostic texts, Norea must be restored to her heavenly place. She invokes the divine triad of Father (Mind, Adamas), Mother (Ennoia, ‘Thought’) and Son (Mind, Logos, Autogenes). The Four Luminaries (holy helpers) (Harmozel, Oroiael, Daveithe and Eleleth) intercede for her with the Father of the All. True gnosis is revealed to her and she is brought from deficiency to fullness (the pleroma).
So she is saved together with the Gnostics,
“Adamas, (name of God) you are within all Adams (people), you have the thought of Norea…”
The Thought of Norea portrays Sophia as an innocent party in that her restoration to the Light does not require repentance for her unintentional but ill-conceived generation of the world creator (demiurge) without the aid of her consort, as described in the Secret Book of John.
As is also the case in Zostrianos, Sophia serves as the model for the material world but is not the source of the world creator who shapes it.
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