This entry records that Gnosticism, a modern scholarly category describing a diverse family of related but distinct religious movements in the ancient Mediterranean world emphasizing salvation through secret spiritual knowledge, gnosis, of one's true divine origin as opposed to material creation, encompassed numerous specific groups, including Valentinians, Sethians and various others, each with its own specific texts, theology and presumably its own ritual and prayer practice, without reproducing that varied liturgical content here.
Scholars of ancient religion increasingly emphasize that Gnosticism was never a single unified church or organization with one shared liturgy, but rather a broad and internally quite diverse category retrospectively applied by modern scholarship to group together movements that ancient participants themselves would likely not have recognized as belonging to one single religious identity, a genuine scholarly caution that makes generalized description of a single Gnostic prayer tradition potentially misleading from the outset.
The term itself derives from gnosis, the Greek word for knowledge, and scholars generally trace its earliest confirmed use as a specific heresiological label to early Christian writers such as Irenaeus, who used it polemically to group together and condemn various groups he regarded as teaching dangerous heretical doctrine.