Pistis Sophia on Salt, Dung and 'Mixture'

I have noticed some similarities between To Theodore's use of Matthew 5:13 and what appears in Pistis Sophia Book III. First, here's the beginning of To Theodore again:

For, priding themselves in knowledge, as they say, "of the deep things of Satan", they do not know that they are casting themselves away into "the nether world of the darkness" of falsity, and boasting that they are free, they have become slaves of servile desires. Such men are to be opposed in all ways and altogether ... [for] of the things they keep saying about the divinely inspired Gospel according to Mark, some are altogether falsifications, and others, even if they do contain some true elements, nevertheless are not reported truly. For the true things, being mixed with inventions, are falsified, so that, as the saying goes, even the salt loses its savor.

The heretics of To Theodore are accused of being such libertines that they have changed the true teachings of Alexandrian orthodoxy. The specific charge against the Carpocratians is that they 'mix' and turn away from the truth. This shows up again later in the letter when it is said that a certain Carpocratian got a hold of Secret Mark and having:

both interpreted according to his blasphemous and carnal doctrine and, moreover, polluted, mixing with the spotless and holy words utterly shameless lies. From this mixture is drawn off the teaching of the Carpocratians.

The Pistis Sophia employs the salt metaphor in a similar context. All we have to do is actually listen to what the text is saying.

To begin with the concept of 'mixture' appears throughout the Pistis Sophia as an allusion to the state of humanity before the mysteries of Jesus were introduced to the world. So the risen Jesus references:

that mystery knoweth why the Mixture which existeth not hath arisen and why it is purified [PS ii.93]

And elsewhere Jesus speaks of the 'mixture' in the following manner:

And the decans of the rulers and their servitors thought that they were souls of the rulers; and the servitors brought them, they bound them into the body of your mothers. And when your time was completed, ye were born in the world without souls of the rulers in you. And ye have received your portion out of the power which the last Helper hath breathed into the Mixture, that [power] which is blended with all the invisibles and all rulers and all æons,--in a word, which is blended with the world of destruction which is the Mixture. This [power], which from the beginning I brought out of myself, I have cast into the First Commandment, and the First Commandment cast a portion thereof into the great Light, and the great Light cast a portion of that which it had received, into the five Helpers, and the last Helper took a portion of that which it received, and cast it into the Mixture. And [this portion] is in all who are in the Mixture, as I have just said unto you. [PS i.8]

In other words 'mixture' here represents the impure state that the world was in by its very nature. Jesus introduced a mystery which purifies this 'mixture' and draws out from it a pure substance identified as 'light' and various other metaphors.

If we go back to the Pistis Sophia salt reference we see Mary Magdalene brought forward to comment on a particular thing uttered by the risen Jesus a little earlier in the narrative:

Mary answered and said: "I have seized on the words which thou hast said. Now, therefore, my Lord, this is the word which thou hast said: 'They who shall receive the mysteries of the Ineffable,--blessed indeed are those souls; but if they turn, transgress, and cease in their faith, and if they go forth out of the body without having repented, they are no more fit from this hour onwards to return to the changes of the body, nor for anything at all, but they are cast out into the outer darkness, they will perish in that region and be non-existent for ever,'--concerning [this] word thou hast spoken unto us aforetime, saying: 'Salt is good; but if the salt becometh sterile, with what are they to salt it? It is fit neither for the dunghill nor for the earth; but they throw it away,'--that is: Blessed are all the souls which shall receive of the mysteries of the Ineffable; but if they once transgress, they are not fit to return to the body henceforth from this hour onwards nor for anything at all, but they are cast into the outer darkness and perish in that region."

Stephen Carlson has argued that Morton Smith must have been the real author of the letter to Theodore because it would be impossible to mix something with salt unless it was free flowing like that manufactured only in recent time by the Morton Salt Company. However what he does not seem to realize is that the key to make sense of ALL these references to salt is to remind ourselves that the gospel itself connects the manufacture of salt quite explicitly to dung. This is not accidental.

The passage in Matthew reads again 'if the salt becometh sterile, with what are they to salt it? It is fit neither for the dunghill nor for the earth; but they throw it away.'

What Carlson does not seem to realize is that in Egypt at that time and for long periods of its prehistory, salt was manufactured FROM camel dung. So Sewell notes in her Ancient History of Egypt:

The priests of the temple carried on a small trade with Lower Egypt by sending thither a valuable salt probably manufactured from the soot of dried camel manure the usual fuel of the Desert, and which from the name of the place was called salt of ammonia.

As such if - as the letter to Theodore suggests - the gospel was written with an Alexandrian or Egyptian audience in mind - the parable in the gospel implies that salt was TAKEN from dung and that when it becomes sterile it returns to its original state, that is 'dung' - or if you prefer the gnostic conception of the Pistis Sophia - the state of 'mixture.'

The idea is reinforced time and again in the Pistis Sophia where - in another section - we read that:

at the commandment of the First Mystery the Mixture was constrained, until all the great [ones] of the emanations of the Light and all their glory purified themselves, and until they purified themselves from the Mixture. And they have not purified themselves of themselves, but they have purified themselves by necessity according to the economy of the One and Only, the Ineffable. They indeed have not at all suffered and have not at all changed themselves in the regions, nor at all torn themselves asunder nor poured themselves into bodies of different kinds and from one into another, nor have they been in any affliction at all. [PS ii.100]

Of course all of this requires more investigation but I believe that the idea that 'mixture' may represent something akin to a state of 'worldliness' has a lot going for it. At the very least its gets around necessitating the invention of free flowing salt.