The only surviving copy comes from the Nag Hammadi library, albeit with 14 pages completely missing and a large number of lines throughout the text damaged beyond recovery.
[2] The content of the text focuses on the 13 seals, the Triple-Powered One, the shape and structure of the soul, acquiring power and knowledge, and an apocalyptic vision.
The text also speaks of a being who exists completely and is seen by the great feminine, but knowledge is limited and one runs the risk of ignorance.
The text also mentions that some sounds are superior to others, such as the aspirates over the inaspirates, and that there are names made up of vowels and consonants that resemble each other.
Marsanes urges the reader to examine who is worthy to reveal divine knowledge and not to desire the sense-perceptible world.
[4] Like Zostrianos, and Allogenes, the text describes a very elaborate esoteric cosmogony of successive emanations from an original God, as revealed by Marsanes, who is recognized as a Gnostic prophet.
[2] Within the text there are indications that the Sethians had developed ideas of monism, an idea comparable to Heracleon's notion of universal perfection and permanence as expressed through the constancy of the total mass of things within it (that is, all matter in the universe may only change form, and may not be created or destroyed), and the later Stoic insistence of nothing existing beyond the material.
Common Gnostic thought is especially prominent through the text's discussion on the power of sacred knowledge, which can allow readers to ascend through the levels of the universe until they reach the highest heaven where God resides.