Gnosticism
A cluster of early Christian and Christian-adjacent sects, branded heretical by the orthodox church, holding that the material world is a flawed prison created by a lesser, ignorant deity — the demiurge — and that salvation comes not through faith or works but through gnosis, a direct, secret spiritual knowledge of the true, hidden God above and beyond matter. Gnostic systems typically feature a sharp dualism between spirit and matter, the soul as a divine spark trapped in a counterfeit reality, and a saviour figure who brings the saving knowledge from outside the false world. The tradition draws on Platonic, Jewish, and Zoroastrian sources, flourished in the 2nd–4th centuries, and was largely suppressed until the 1945 rediscovery of the Nag Hammadi library revived scholarly and popular interest.