I wasn't suggesting they were consistent with orthodox Christianity; on the other hand, it would be unwise to go on what's said in the Catholic Encyclopedia, for example. It was written in 1912, and we knew nothing about the gnostics, except what their enemies wrote about them, until 1947, when a library of their writings was found at Nag Hammadi. The theology is obviously un-Christian; but the pre-fall human as spiritual, locked into a physical body by the fall, struck me as a very Gnostic idea. The Gnostics took it a step further by making the godhead itself dualist.
There is still a living gnostic sect, curiously enough - the Mandaeans of southern Iran. They've been heavily persecuted by the Islamic government, with little attention from the rest of the world.
Mandeans are primarily in Southern Iraq, not Iran. Some very interesting versions of Christianity survive in Iraq, including the Assyrians and Chaldeans. Mandeans, Assyrians and Chaldeans all speak Aramaic, the language Christ spoke.