"Beautifully written and thoroughly documented, demonstrates years of engagement with its materials and offers a new contextualization of within these cosmogonic traditions." — April D. DeConick, Rice University "Using forgotten Slavonic texts, Andrei Orlov breaks new ground in the understanding of the history of Jewish mysticism. His original and audacious monograph will trigger extensive revisions of the history of Kabbalah as understood in modern scholarship. His argument is compelling and requires special attention in both the field of Slavonic apocrypha and in the emergence of medieval and Lurianic Kabbalah." — Moshe Idel, Hebrew University of Jerusalem constitutes a monumental achievement in the comparative study of the dualist-tinged cosmogonies found within a variety of religious and theosophic treatises emanating from the eastern Mediterranean world from late antiquity, the Middle Ages, and early modernity. Through a systematic and rigorous philological examination, the author weaves together a complex tapestry of discrete textual sources and unravels a number of intriguing and stimulating correspondences, which point toward their reliance upon and adaptation of a stream of more ancient shared traditional cosmogonic lore. The result is a magisterial accomplishment that compels us to reimagine the possible interrelationships among Jewish, Christian, Manichaean, and gnostic esoterica." — John C. Reeves, University of North Carolina at Charlotte "In this seminal book, Orlov pursues one step further his archeology of esoteric and mystical knowledge in Judaism and Christianity. , he convincingly argues, has been consistently understudied. In a feast of deep philology, he shows it lies at the root of gnostic and Manichaean late antique esoteric traditions, as well as of medieval and early modern Kabbalistic doctrines. Orlov's oeuvre has deeply transformed our understanding of the long-standing impact of early Jewish cosmogonic and eschatological conceptions." — Guy G. Stroumsa, Hebrew University of Jerusalem