IAO: Ophite Iconography by Jose Gabriel Alegría Sabogal (Anathema Publishing, 2022) Hardcover

Jose Gabriel Alegría Sabogal. IAO: Ophite Iconography. Montreal: Anathema Publishing, 2022. Hardcover. 221 pages. Limited to 913 copies. Condition: As New Description from the publisher:  IAO is an iconographic proposal, an attempt to illustrate the Gnostic worldview and its myths as understood by the Ophites, a sect of which little is known. It is, perhaps, an exercise of imagination, of what Christian iconography could have resembled if the Ophites had survived. Visually, it follows the sequences of the Speculum Humanae Salvationis and the Biblia Pauperum, reordering their contents according to this heterodox initiative.   “Gnosticism lacks images in a remarkable way, the abstraction of its texts is only equated by the visual silence of its few and discrete remains. And yet the texts are filled with images! “These images are, in fact, visions, allegories, and myths of a yet unexplored richness. And the ambitious proposal here is to consolidate an iconographic programme…”  Central to