When Time Awoke

An hour can vanish in a moment, or drag on forever. The clock never changes. So what does?
For centuries, ancient writers told a strange and beautiful story: that the soul began in eternity, fell into time through longing and forgetting, and could one day find its way home. It runs through the Gospel of Mary, the Gospels of Thomas and Philip, the Hymn of the Pearl and the Pistis Sophia, where Mary Magdalene is the disciple who understands most deeply. Plato and Plotinus asked the same questions in the language of philosophy.

Then, in Victorian London, the questions returned. Helena Blavatsky wrote that before the universe began, "Time was not." G. R. S. Mead brought the Pistis Sophia into English for the first time. And an American writer named Julia Keightley, who signed herself Jasper Niemand, described lying apparently lifeless on a winter morning, mourned by those around her, while her sense of time vanished altogether, only to return at the very moment she felt separate again. Her account was then lost for half a century, until a bound volume turned up in Toronto.

Drawing on these sources, and on thinkers from Augustine to Henri Bergson, Duncan Smart follows a single question across more than two thousand years: if time awoke when the soul came to feel separate, what does it mean to come home?

Inside, you'll discover:

• Why the same hour can pass in a flash for one person and crawl for another, and what Augustine and Bergson made of it


• The Gnostic myth of Sophia, the divine Wisdom who fell through longing, and the story of her rescue


• Mary Magdalene's vision of the soul rising past the powers that hold it, in the Gospel of Mary


• The prince who forgot he was a king's son, in the ancient Hymn of the Pearl


• The letters of William Quan Judge on time and the present moment, and the remarkable rediscovery of Keightley's lost account, The Sleeping Spheres


• What the Gospel of Thomas means by a Kingdom "already spread out over the earth"

Written in a warm, clear voice for curious readers rather than specialists, When Time Awoke sets ancient texts, philosophy and personal testimony side by side, and is honest about where evidence ends and interpretation begins.

The answer it finds is not an escape from the world, but a different way of living within it.

From the author of The Gospel of Mary Magdalene: The Missing Pages and The Jesus Pattern.