Gnosticism

Gnosticism is the name for a family of religious currents that flourished alongside early Christianity and Neoplatonism in the first centuries CE — the Sethians, the Valentinians, and others. Despite their variety, they shared a vision: salvation comes through gnosis, a secret saving knowledge of God and of one's own divine origin.

Most taught a sharp dualism. Above is the unknowable true God of the spiritual fullness; below is the material world, made not by him but by an ignorant or malevolent Demiurge, in which the divine spark of the soul lies trapped, asleep, awaiting the call to awaken and return.

The Gnostics drew on Platonic and Hermetic themes, but Plotinus attacked them fiercely in his treatise 'Against the Gnostics', scorning their contempt for the cosmos and their claim to private revelation, and defending the goodness and beauty of the world-order against their gloom.