Let’s be clear here: I barely know anything about Gnosticism. It’s a spiritual tradition that as far as I can tell has been mostly dead for ages, and it’s roots are tangled with Christianity, so the history we’re dealing here is massive, complex, and often contradictory.

I learned about Gnosticism simply by taking note of thoroughly Modern works that play with its symbols and ideas, and not always in a completely sincere way, or at least not an overtly religious/spiritual one. It’s compelling imagery for worldcrafting! Useful for fiction writing.

And Japan in particular seems to like making God the bad guy in some video games–a suitable threat level for a long campaign, I guess–so a lot of my understanding comes from comparing these modern works and seeing how they use the same symbols the same way, or very very very VERY similarly.

Some of those works are:

-Homestuck

-Mother 3, the sequel to Homestuck’s namesake, Earthbound (and to a lesser extent, Earthbound itself)

-Revolutionary Girl Utena

-The Dark Souls series

-Angel’s Egg (anime movie; it good)

-Persona 5, and generally the Persona series through its Jungian themes.

But when I say Homestuck is a Gnostic work, I don’t mean it’s literally to be understood solely through that particular spiritual doctrine. I just mean it draws from Gnosticism in crafting itself, and deliberately plays off Gnostic themes. Homestuck draws just as much from Greek, Egyptian, and potentially even Judaic myth.

And with most of these works, there’s a lot more going on than just those themes. My other big source here is Carl Jung, a psychoanalyst who was quite influential in the field and in pop culture, too.

RGU, Homestuck, and Persona all explicitly work his ideas into their worldbuilding, and though Jung himself was known to be a Gnostic, he had more to offer than just regurgitating Gnostic ideas per se. He’s probably the biggest source of Gnostic inspiration for modern writing, though. You can find a free compilation of some of his Gnostic writing here.

You might also want to check out Herman Hesse’s Demian, a novel I’ve read (its good) explicitly dealing with Gnosticism set just before the beginning of WWI. It’s a well-known influence on Utena in particular, and reading it illuminated some of the prominent symbolism across all of the works I just mentioned, too.

Hope you have fun with this! I’d probably reccomend engaging with any or all of the more modern works and seeing what comparisons you can draw to Homestuck, rather than trying to force yourself to read relatively dry ancient literature without context. This is all for fun!