In 1945, near the village of Nag Hammadi along the east bank of the Nile River, a local farmer, digging for fertilizer in the arid desert, made an unlikely discovery: a sealed jar containing a collection of leatherbound, previously unknown early Christian texts. Now known as the Nag Hammadi Library, the findings, dated to the 4th century and including now-famous works such as the Gospel of Thomas and the Gospel of Truth, revealed to scholars a much more diverse, if not confounding, version of early Christianity than previously understood.
It was here that the nearly 2,000-year-old enigmatic poem called The Thunder, Perfect Mind, was also found, surviving in a single fourth-century Coptic manuscript. Beguiling and mystifying contemporary readers since its discovery, the poem is comprised of a puzzling array of paradoxical “I am” statements made by a singular divine feminine voice. It has been compared by scholars to The Gospel of John (“I am the way, the truth, and the life) and to the Isis aretalogies from Egypt (“I am she that is the natural mother of all things...”), among other historical texts. At the same time, The Thunder, Perfect Mind offers undeniable contemporary relevance for how it boldly challenges a reductive, if not moralistic view of the world built on dualistic categories, such as good versus evil, strength versus weakness, human versus divine, or truth versus falsehood.
It is for all these reasons and more that The Thunder, Perfect Mind became the centerpiece of a collaborative evening of performance, music, and scholarship on April 9. Hosted by the CSWR, the evening offered a prismatic view of the work through an array of lenses, including a dramatic reading of Thunder by actress Shadi Ghaheri, as well as two lectures, by HDS professor Dr. Karen King and by independent scholar Dr. Tilde Bak Halvgaard. Additionally, CSWR Scholar in Residence, Dr. Anne Dorothy Harley, commissioned the production of two original musical scores in response to Thunder, and these works, by composers Jane Sheldon and Julian Bennett Holmes, made their world debut at the event. Overall, the evening celebrated — and even conjured — the same wonder, awe, and divine mystery that one imagines would inspire the creation of such a text in its original conception. Indeed, it transported the audience to an arena in which a 2000-year-old text could be absorbed not only intellectually, but as a fully embodied, sensorial experience. In fact, Dr. Harley called it “a valuable and, indeed, rare experience,” adding that the opportunity to engage side-by-side with both a scholarly and musical interpretation of a text was “a dream come true.”
With such a provocative title as The Thunder, Perfect Mind, one cannot help but ask, as Professor Charles Stang did in his opening remarks for the event: Who or what is this perfect mind, and how is it made to thunder? Presumed to have been translated into Coptic from the original Greek, “mind” in this context — or nοῦς in ancient Greek — is not a faculty of cognitive or dialectical reason, according to Professor Stang. Rather, nοῦς contains within it a capacity for “immediate transcendental intuition,” a faculty capable of perceiving — and more importantly receiving — eternal truth.
And this is how performer Shadi Ghaheri delivered the piece: as a revelation, an invocation, even a possession at times — as a presence emerging from some other time and place. “I was sent from the power,” she began, “and I have come to those who think upon me.” Reflecting the multivalent nature of the poem itself, Ghaheri maneuvered in swift turns between a litany of diverse, ecstatic expressions: childlike, defiant, exuberant, vengeful. She confronted audience members directly, in some cases, asking riddle-like questions such as, “Why, you who hate me, do you love me / And hate those who love me?” Some passages echoed familiar Biblical passages that then made surprising turns, such as, “For I am the first and the last. / I am the honored and the scorned. / I am the harlot and the holy one.” In other moments, as if suddenly invoking or channeling a higher vehicle of knowledge, she appeared to summon messages from deep within herself through full-bodied inhalations. As she descended further into her revelations, the more confounding her utterances became: “I am the name of the voice and the voice of the name. I am the sign of writing and the manifestation of difference.” Throughout the entire performance, she appeared to both absorb and project to the audience the totality of both human and divine experience, addressing the rich and the poor, the holy and the unholy, the wise and the foolish, and at the same time, “challenging the fixity and stability of every kind of marker,” as Professor King observed in her lecture.
As one might imagine, scholarly interpretations of The Thunder, Perfect Mind are infinitely varied, as readers have wrestled with deciphering the speaker's identity and the riddle of its paradoxical structure since it was published. In her lecture, A Voice of Radical Acceptance for Troubled Times, Professor Karen King analyzed the work as a collection of prophetic oracles, which were traditionally understood as invitations to a unique type of hearing, often requiring skilled interpretation. Presuming the work was written for performance, King suggested that Thunder may have been intended for a liturgical audience, where participants not only recite the poem but in doing so, dissolve the boundary between the human and the divine. With great insight, King then extended this interpretation to modern readers, proposing that reciting the work aloud to oneself can serve as an exercise in self-inquiry and self-reflection — indeed, as an exercise in which “her voice becomes our voice.” In doing so, King added, “we are incited to name our own paradoxes, our own transgressions, our complexities, uncertainties, strengths, and frailties, and to acknowledge the workings of power and the workings of powerlessness…” Similarly, King praised scholar Anne McGuire who suggests that Thunder’s logic “displaces opposites with paradoxes that cross over and nullify boundaries,” and in this way, quoting from McGuire, “the text opens new possibilities for the critique and reinterpretation of such polarities.” In this way, King argued that text can be viewed as an invitation to radical acceptance, as it repeatedly asks the reader to look beyond dualities toward a greater capaciousness, defying voices, both within and without, that would seek to reduce ourselves and each other to mere categories.
Dr. Tilde Bak Halvgaard’s lecture entitled What Is the Sound of Silence? focused on a linguistic approach to Thunder, pointing out that the play with language in the piece dissolves our usual sense of how meaning is formed through language. Citing examples in the text which she refers to as “linguistic passages,” Dr. Halvgaard theorized ways in which the speaker “becomes language herself,” noting lines such as, “I'm the silence that is incomprehensible and the thought whose remembrance is great.” Turning to ancient philosophy, Dr. Halvgaard presented an analysis of these linguistic passages as viewed through Stoic theory on voice. For Dr. Halvgaard, the Stoic sequence of verbal expression — thought, sound/voice, speech, word — operates as an underlying matrix in the poem, while at the same time, at least semantically, turning the sequence upside down. In Thunder, the highest semantic level is not the logical or rational, but rather found in silence itself. In the second linguistic passage, Dr. Halvgaard notes the importance of how the narrator refers to her own name — “I’m the utterance of my name,” and “I’m the knowledge of my name”— suggesting that the sound of “thunder” could very well be the sound of her name as it is uttered. Turning to Plato’s theory on dialogue — specifically, the idea that “names” (or what we call things) do not sufficiently describe the very essence of a thing — Dr. Halvgaard suggests that, as in Plato’s theory, one must instead turn to the qualities of the speaker (rather than her name) to grasp her true nature. In this way, Dr. Halvgaard posits that the narrator of Thunder reveals language by being language itself, but in doing so, also dissolves language.
The musical performances of the evening, interspersed between lectures, were both stirring, ekphrastic meditations on Thunder. Uncannily, both captured the experience of what a “paradox” might sound like, each serving as a reflection on not only the structural and conceptual motifs of Thunder, but also on its revelatory, hypnotic, and ineffable qualities as well.
For Thunder: Perfect Mind (2024), composer Jane Sheldon noted that she wanted to capture how the speaker in Thunder holds contrasting aspects of herself in dynamic tension. To this end, the piece featured two female voices (performed by Sheldon and Anne Dorothy Harley) negotiating back and forth between consonant and discordant harmonies with each other. Adding to this effect, Sheldon utilized combination tones in the vocals, which psychoacoustically created the false perception of a mysterious third tone. Similarly, the bass clarinetist, whose role was primarily textural, Sheldon explained, played almost multiphonically, as the clarinet’s tone split into multiple pitches simultaneously, thus creating instability and fragility. Similarly, in The name of the sound and the sound of the name (2024), by composer Julian Bennett Holmes, a similar use of tonal discordance was equally stirring. In his piece, three vocalists began by singing in single lilting notes, each merging in and out of synchronicity. Positioned at opposite ends of the room, the vocalists began moving closer and closer together toward the center of the room. As their proximity narrowed, their harmonies became more and more discordant. Comparing the works to successful film adaptations of novels, Professor Karen King said that composers Jane Sheldon and Julian Bennett Holmes simply “got” the poem, adding that the pieces “gave substance and made real the tenor and the sound of the voices that were in my head about what this text is.”
Thunder, Perfect Mind is CSWR’s second event featuring Dr. Harley’s music commissions and performances, preceded by last semester’s Enheduanna: Voicing the Feminine Divine. In a conversation with members of the audience after the April 9 event, HDS student Paul Gillis-Smith said that both events conjured “a much more experiential aspect of the study of religion,” and that “it’s great to think with [Dr. Harley’s] events on how can I adapt my own studies to be practically, sonically, experientially oriented.” In a similar vein, CSWR’s Postdoctoral Fellow Russell Powell, whose scholarship is in the philosophy of religion as it relates to meaning-making and religious practice, delighted at the intersection of so many fields and methodologies relevant to his scholarship: “Getting these texts out to wider audiences and making them more available in multiple avenues, and also seeing [Thunder] pulled off so artistically is really inspiring.” Overall, this special collaborative event underscores the CSWR’s dedication to cross-disciplinary innovation when it comes to the academic study of religion, infusing traditional scholarship and academic curiosity with the experiential, the artistic, and the embodied.
Read "The Thunder, Perfect Mind", translation by Anne McGuire.
-Story by Faith McClure