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VISIONARY REVUE
After nine years at the Lectorium
Rosicrucianum, esoteric motifs began to appear in
Johfra’s work in the late 1950’s. Up to that time, he
had painted mostly Surrealist landscapes. But over
the course of the sixties, these landscapes became
increasingly populated by esoteric symbols. One of
his earliest attempts at an expressly Esoteric
painting is his Pistis Sophia (1959).
Here, a woman in rags crawls toward a distant
light, which appears between two columns in the
background. Meanwhile, she is being mocked or
pursued by a caval of demons and beasts, including
a lion-headed dragon. In the right foreground
human figures are dancing in drunken revelry
while, on the left, other figures are sleeping. Some
however have gradually awoken and, like the
tattered woman, are reaching towards the light.
The title of the painting is taken from a Gnostic
Gospel which relates a dialogue between the risen
Christ and his disciples. In it, many essential
elements of Gnosticism are described. G.R.S.
Mead’s English translation appeared in 1921 (from
a British Museum manuscript acquired in 1785).
Meanwhile, the chief corpus of Gnostic writings, the
Nag Hammadi library, was not discovered until
1945, and did not appear in English until 1978.
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PISTIS SOPHIA (1959)
heavens appeared Pistis Sophia (Wisdom), a female
companion who aided the Father in creating the
cosmos.
But, acting alone and without his knowledge, she
gave birth to Yaldabaoth, a Demiurge who
generated the lower aeons: the seven planets and the
earth whirling around in the darkness. Yaldabaoth
is a lion-headed serpent who glows like the fire of
the sun. He commands the seven archons who
appear to us as the seven planets in lower aeons.
Also under his command are the many demons who
hold sway on the earth and in our bodies, as lust,
envy, anger, etc. All of these trap humans and their
particles of the divine Light in matter, time, passion,
desire, fate, and forgetting.
After generating him, Sophia’s own progeny
turned against her. “And the great lion-faced
light-power devoured all the light powers in Sophia...
and her matter was thrust into chaos” (Pistis Sophia
ch. 31). As a result, Sophia fell to the earth in the
form of a woman, and forgot her origins in the
divine. And indeed, all of us, who possess the
‘indweller of light’ in us, have also forgotten that we
too were once descended from the Great Light. That
is the revelation that Christ brings, the gnosis, the
remembrance of our origins.
In light of the Gnostic text, we now see Johfra’s
painting as an image to help us remember our
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When Johfra painted this canvas in 1959, the Pistis
Sophia was one of the few Gnostic works available
to him.
In this text, Christ says to his disciples that we
are all drunken with desire, or else slumbering in
forgetfulness of our true origins. Only those who
have ‘sobered up’ or ‘awoken’ can remember the
events that transpired at the beginning of the world.
This is the knowledge and revelation, the gnosis,
which Christ brings to man. He reveals the
‘indweller of light’ in each of us, which Gnostics
also called the ‘pneuma’, symbolized by a spark or
pearl.
Through the pearl in us, we remember that, at
the beginning, ‘a Great Light’ appeared and
separated itself into the upper aeons (or heavens). In
these
forgotten origins. As we meditate upon it, we
recognize the Pistis Sophia in rags, fallen to the
earth but still reaching for the light. One or two
figures on the left also reach for it. But the majority
are sleeping or enmired in drunkeness. Yaldabaoth,
the lion-headed dragon, rules over this darkened
realm with his court of archons and demons. The
composition as a whole evokes a particular passage
from the Pistis Sophia.
“And Pistis Sophia cried out most exceedingly, she
cried to the Light of lights, which she had seen from
the beginning... and uttered this repentence: Save me,
O Light, for evil thoughts have entered into me”
(Pistis Sophia ch. 32).

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