The Rediscovery of the Carpocratians

 (based on a reconstruction first developed by Andrew Criddle)

If you only knew the Carpocratians from the patristic handbooks, you’d think they were a minor, slightly lurid footnote in the second century: a fringe group somewhere between Alexandria and Cephallenia, name-checked by Irenaeus, Clement, Epiphanius, then quietly filed away under “Gnostics We Have Dutifully Refuted.”

But their afterlife is much stranger than that. They more or less disappear for a millennium, then suddenly re-emerge in the nineteenth century as supposed keepers of Atlantean wisdom, get folded into Masonic mythography, and never really go away again. The path from near-oblivion to occult celebrity runs through a very specific chain of rediscoveries, misunderstandings, and forgeries.

The basic historical spine of that story was laid out with great clarity by Andrew Criddle, and what follows is essentially an expansion of his sketch.

Praedestinatus and the “early Carpocratians”

The first mini–revival of the Carpocratians in modern scholarship came with the rediscovery and publication of the Latin pseudo-heresiological treatise Praedestinatus (usually dated to the fifth century).

One of the curiosities of Praedestinatus is that, when it finally became available to early modern scholars, it offered a tantalizing chronological hook: it seemed to place the Carpocratians already in the era of Paul and Barnabas, around the time of their split and Barnabas’s departure with Mark to Cyprus. Read naively, this meant you could talk about Carpocratians as a very early Christian phenomenon, potentially being personally confronted by Barnabas himself.

That little possibility was catnip to writers looking for an early, “primitive” Gnostic foil to apostolic Christianity. So Praedestinatus was duly cited, but in quite a limited way. It was mostly used to pull the Carpocratians earlier, to the 50s CE, and that was that. For all the quirkiness of their doctrine in Irenaeus and Clement, the Carpocratians still mostly lived in the footnotes.

The Cyrene inscriptions and Atlantis

The real turning point, as Criddle stresses, was not a new patristic text at all, but archaeology—or rather, what claimed to be archaeology.

In the early nineteenth century, a set of inscriptions were reported from Cyrene in North Africa and interpreted as “Carpocratian” epitaphs or monuments. These were not obscure philological tidbits. They were quickly drawn into much grander narratives: attempts to locate Plato’s Atlantis in the western Mediterranean, to link Gnostic wisdom with ancient mystery cults and lost continents, and so on.

The Carpocratians, in this telling, were no longer a small sect mentioned in passing by Irenaeus; they became visible actors in a much larger story about primordial wisdom, sunken civilizations, and esoteric Christianity.

The problem, of course, is that the inscriptions were forgeries. As later scholars such as Gieseler showed, they appear to have been manufactured precisely to support those speculative reconstructions about Atlantis and primeval Egypto-Hellenistic gnosis. The “Carpocratian” label was part of the bait: a genuine-sounding heretical brand to hang on stones that had never seen a second century.

But once a group has been dragged out of oblivion into this kind of discourse, it is very hard to stuff it back in. Even after the forgeries were exposed, the Carpocratians had acquired a new aura. They were no longer just one more name in the heresiological catalogues; they had become emblematic of a certain type of Christianity: magical, libertine, philosophically inflected, and conveniently obscure enough that one could project almost anything onto them.

From patristic footnote to occult wallpaper

From that point on, Carpocrates and his circle drift through both academic and fringe literature in a way that far exceeds their modest footprint in the ancient sources.

On the scholarly side, they appear in histories of Gnosticism as one of the earliest attempts to articulate a Christian cosmology in which the Jewish god is de-centered. In Irenaeus’s report, the Carpocratians say the world is made by angels “greatly inferior to the unbegotten Father”; Jesus is the son of Joseph and an ordinary man whose soul, uniquely pure, remembers the realm of the highest God and escapes the rule of the creators. Souls like his, they say, can do the same.

Even in this hostile source, you can see why they appealed to later readers. The system is recognizably Christian but already loosening its ties to Jewish scripture and pushing the creator-god down a notch. It is easy to turn that into a transitional stage in the story many moderns want to tell: from a Jewish Jesus to a cosmic Christ, from YHWH to the unknown Father.

On the occult side, their reported practices—magical arts, incantations, love-potions, traffic with spirits; their veneration of images of Jesus alongside Pythagoras, Plato and Aristotle—made them ideal mascots for those who wanted a lineage of “Christian Hermeticism” or “esoteric Christianity” stretching from Alexandria to the lodges and lodges-with-altars of nineteenth-century Europe.

Once the forged Cyrene inscriptions had done their work of making the name familiar and suggestive, you could invoke the Carpocratians as often as you liked without anyone demanding too much precision.

Arethas and the Byzantine memory of Carpocrates

Criddle’s timeline runs mostly from late antiquity into the modern period, but there is also an important medieval waypoint that shows the name never entirely disappeared: tenth-century Constantinople.

Arethas, archbishop of Caesarea in Cappadocia, is famous as the owner and annotator of the codex that preserves the text of Revelation and other works, and as an editor of Clement of Alexandria’s Protrepticus and Paedagogus. He turns up again, unexpectedly, in the politics of marriage law under emperor Leo VI.

In a furious polemical piece written against the patriarch Nikolaos Mystikos over the question of a fourth imperial marriage, Arethas lets fly a remarkable line:

“All-revolving time has brought back to us Carpocrateses and Cerdos,”

meaning, in effect: people who oppose second marriages and drive men into secret fornication are the true heirs of Carpocrates and Cerdo. He then plays the full heresiological chord: secret teaching, mystery rites, antisocial rigorism masquerading as holiness, and so on.

That Byzantine flare-up matters because it shows the Carpocratians still functioning, centuries later, as shorthand for a certain package of accusations: libertine in effect, hypocritical in posture, philosophically contaminated. When modern readers “rediscover” the Carpocratians through forged inscriptions and occult handbooks, they are in fact plugging into a much longer polemical tradition, one in which the name is a kind of floating signifier for the dangerous, seductive edge of Christian heterodoxy.

Why this matters for “rediscovery”

Put all this together, and “rediscovery of the Carpocratians” becomes a layered process rather than a single event.

There is the early modern rediscovery of Praedestinatus, which gave scholars an excuse to pull them closer to the apostolic age.

There is the nineteenth-century episode of the Cyrene forgeries, which jerked them from specialist obscurity into the wider imagination as markers of ancient esoteric Christianity and even Atlantean lore.

There is the long, intermittent Byzantine memory, where a bishop like Arethas can reach for “Carpocrates” as a ready-made label for those he wants to tar with the brush of clandestine, philosophically tainted heresy.

And beneath all this, there is the actual, very limited dossier in Irenaeus and a few others, which tells us almost nothing certain but is just vivid enough—angels making the world, Jesus as Joseph’s son with a perfect memory of the unbegotten Father, magical practices, veneration of Greek philosophers—to invite projection.

Criddle’s point, sharpened, is that the nineteenth-century forgery episode is the real hinge for modern prominence. Without those stones at Cyrene, the Carpocratians probably would have remained what they had been for centuries: a small puzzle-piece in the heresiological mosaics, interesting mostly to specialists. With them, they became available as symbols—for scholars constructing genealogies of Gnostic thought, for polemicists railing against “paganized” Christianity, and for occultists in search of ancient brands to paste onto their own inventions.

That is the rediscovery: not a sudden access to new, reliable data about Carpocrates and his circle, but a sequence of moments in which their name was pulled forward and made to do new work.