This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Gnosticism gathers three schools modern scholarship most often names as classically Gnostic, distinguished by founder and region but sharing one underlying story: a divine fullness above the world, a flawed act that produced the material creation, and a redeemer or gnosis that wakes the divine element trapped within it.
Sethianism is one of the two main currents modern scholarship distinguishes within Gnosticism, named for the biblical Seth, whom its texts treat as the ancestor of a saved race and as a revealer. Its writings, several of them recovered in the Nag Hammadi codices, describe a divine fullness above the creator of this world, a fall within it, and the descent of a redeemer to wake the divine element trapped in human beings. The Apocryphon of John is its best known text.
Valentinianism was the single most influential and widely attested school of Christian Gnosticism, founded by the second century teacher Valentinus. Its theology elaborated a complex pleroma of paired divine emanations, attributed the material world's flawed origin to the youngest of them, Sophia, and divided humanity into three classes according to their capacity to receive gnosis. Unlike some other Gnostic schools, Valentinians generally continued to worship within ordinary Christian congregations rather than forming a separate church.
Basilideanism, the third school, was founded by Basilides, who taught in Alexandria in the second century and is credited with an elaborate emanationist cosmology descending through hundreds of heavens toward an unbegotten, unnamed Father. It survives chiefly through hostile summaries by heresiologists whose accounts disagree with each other, so what the original teaching held remains debated among scholars.