Opening…

VII. POST-CHRISTIAN GNOSTICS

Expectation of Parusia causes Gnosticism to be ignored by Apostolic writers—Change in Christian teaching at end of Ist century—Destruction of Temple of Jerusalem forces Christians to separate from Jews—Some compromise with heathenism necessary—Coveted position of Christian bishops—Founders of Gnostic sects—Only evidence of their teaching till lately, Irenaeus and Epiphanius, both unsatisfactory—Discovery of Philosophumena of Hippolytus, and Salmon and Stähelin’s attacks on its credibility—The Pistis Sophia and Bruce Papyrus—General features of Post-Christian Gnostics—Their belief in Divinity and Historicity of Jesus—Difficulties arising from this and their various solutions—Secrecy of doctrine common among Gnostics and consequent calumnies—Many Gnostic doctrines still doubtful—Parallel between the Gnostic and Protestant sects—Gnosticism bridge between heathenism and Christianity—Effect of this on Catholic practice and doctrine 1-24

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VIII. POST-CHRISTIAN GNOSTICS:—THE OPHITES

Different accounts of origin of Ophites—Alteration from time to time of their doctrines—Phrygia first home of Ophites and its history—Its religion and bi-sexual deity lead to theocrasia—Jewish settlements in Phrygia and their apostasy—Addiction of Phrygian Jews to magic—Their connection with Cabala uncertain—Ineffable First Cause of the Ophites—The Great Light or Supreme Being at once Father-and-Son—Female Deity necessary in Phrygia—Formation of Supreme Triad of Father, Mother, and Son—Messenger of Triad called Christos—Creation of Universe by Powers intermediate between God and man, and Legend of Sophia—Sophia’s son Ialdabaoth the Demiurge, the seven heavens, and their rulers—The Ophiomorphus or serpent-shaped god, whence derived—Passions of mankind derived from Ophiomorphus, but latter not bad—Creation of Man by planetary powers—The seven earthly demons, Talmud, and Cabala—Man’s soul brought from above by Christos—The soul of the world and the Mysteries—Ophites followers of Jesus, but believe in salvation through Mysteries—Scheme of redemption and abstinence from generation—Composite nature of Jesus, His earthly life, passion, and resurrection—Rites attributed to Ophites—Naassene Hymn and its explanation—Changes of man’s soul and Gospel according to the Egyptians—Necessity of guide through next world like Book of the Dead—Celsus’ Diagram described and explained—“Defences” or Apologiae of soul added by Origen—Explanation of and commentary on Diagram and Defences—Spread and decay of Ophite sect—Gradual modification of their doctrines and connection with the Pistis Sophia—Apocryphal Gospels used by Ophites: extracts quoted—Ophites apply fantastic interpretation to all literature 25-82

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IX. POST-CHRISTIAN GNOSTICS: VALENTINUS

Early Ophites probably uneducated—General softening of manners under Julian Emperors and development of morality—Change in ethical ideals of Gnosticism probably starts in Alexandria—Doctrines of Saturninus and Basilides—Basilides’ system never intended for public use and probably merges in that of Valentinus—Links with Simon Magus and Ophites—Success of Valentinus’ teaching and abuse of him by Fathers—Valentinus’ theology: Bythos either bi-sexual or makes syzygy with Sigê—Emanation of Ogdoad—Valentinus’ statements as to this possibly metaphors—Emanation of Decad and Dodecad—Names of Aeons and their explanation—Sophia and her Fall in Valentinus’ system—Her Ectroma and emanation of Christos, the Holy Spirit, and the Cross—Sophia Without and Jesus the Joint Fruit of the Pleroma—Formation of worlds from passions of Sophia Without and their rulers—The different natures of men and demons—The Heavenly Banquet—Valentinus’ predestinarian views contrasted with Ophites’—Salvation of Psychics by Jesus—-Valentinus’ account of Crucifixion doubtful—Life of Valentinus—His successors—Italic School: Ptolemy, Secundus, and Heracleon—Anatolic School: Axionicus, Bardesanes, Theodotus, and Alexander—Life of Bardesanes and his Hymns—Valentinus’ innovations on Christianity and attitude of early Fathers towards them—His use of metaphor and “God is Love”—Exegesis of Valentinus and his followers and his pastoral attitude—Did Valentinus ever attempt to break with Church or to found secret sect?—Valentinus’ compliance with heathenism attracts rich and learned—Dangers of this for Church—Proceedings of Marcus—-Spread of sect after Valentinus’ death—Ptolemy’s letter to Flora—Egypt natural home of sect—Its Decay—Half-way house between earlier Gnosticism and Catholicism 83-133

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X. THE SYSTEM OF THE PISTIS SOPHIA AND ITS RELATED TEXTS

Description of the Pistis Sophia MS.—Story of two first parts—Pre-terrestrial acts of Jesus—Incarnation and Second Ascension with address of the Powers—Arrangement of Heavenly Worlds and their occupants: the Powers above and below the Veil: those of the Right, Middle, and Left—The starry world—Adventures of Jesus’ passage to the upper worlds—He changes the course of the stars—Meeting of Jesus with Pistis Sophia and her history—Is the Pistis Sophia the Interrogations of Mary?—Ophite features in Pistis Sophia—Valentinian ones more marked—Joys of elect in next world and places according to mysteries—Mysteries are sacraments—Eucharistic grace revealed in book—-Complete union of worshippers with deity confined to few—Egyptian features in book—Existing MS., Coptic version of Greek text—Original work probably by Valentinus—The Texts of the Saviour: a thaumaturgic work—Its continuation—Texts of the Saviour later than Pistis Sophia and quotations from them—Are the Texts by Marcus the Magician?—The Bodleian Papyrus Bruce and its divisions—One fragment must be later than Pistis Sophia—Another connected with the Texts of the Saviour—Dr Karl Schmidt’s views as to date, etc. discussed—Increase of post-mortem terrors in later books, a peculiarly Egyptian feature—Degeneration of Gnosticism in Egypt and its magical tendencies—Ill effects of this upon Egyptian Christianity—Services rendered to Church by Gnosticism generally 134-202

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XI. MARCION

Increase of anti-Jewish feeling in Rome under Antoninus Pius—History of Marcion—Terror of Church at Marcion’s doctrine—Uncompromising character of Marcionism—Marcion’s expurgation of Scripture—His Antitheses—His Two Gods—His Docetic views—His anti-Jewish teaching—His treatment of the Pauline Epistles—His abhorrence of allegory—The original nature of his system and its resemblance to Protestantism—Puritanism of Marcionites—History of Marcionism—Rise of sects within it—Marcion’s follower Apelles leans towards Catholicism—Tatian’s, Encratites’, and other variations of Marcionism—After Constantine, many Marcionites rejoin Church—Others coalesce with Manichaeans—Failure of Marcion’s attempted reform—Interest of Marcion’s heresy for later ages 203-223

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XII. THE WORSHIP OF MITHRAS

Reaction of East towards Persia in Roman times—Struggle between Rome and Persia only closes with Mahommedan Invasion—Rome leans to Persian fashions and proclaims Mithras protector of Empire—How Mithraism reached Rome—Its propagation by the soldiery—Mithras may have been originally god of Western Asia—His place in Persian religion—Magism, its tenets and connection with magic—And with astrology—Uncertainty as to Mithraic tenets and Cumont’s theory—Roman ideas as to Ormuzd and Ahriman—Connection of Mithras with the Sun—The Legend of Mithras—Explanation of Tauroctony—The Mithraic Eucharist or Banquet—Mithras probably the only god for his worshippers—His position midway between heaven and earth—Ahriman in Mithraism—Identified with Greek Hades—Lord of Destiny—The seven spheres in Mithraism—Eclecticism of Mithraics as to worship of other gods—Possibly as to Christianity also—The Mysteries of Mithras—The seven degrees of initiation—Privileges of higher initiates doubtful—The so-called Mithraic Liturgy—The priests and ceremonies of Mithraism—Likeness of Mithraism to Freemasonry and its political uses—Decline of Mithraism on loss of Dacia—Its extinction under Gratian—Exclusion of women from mysteries drawback to Mithraism—Not attractive save to soldiers—Survivals of Mithraism in royal titles—And in magic and astrology 224-276

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XIII. MANES AND THE MANICHAEANS

Contrast between Mithraism and Manichaeism—Life and Death of Manes—Ardeshîr, son of Sassan, finds religion necessary to State—Restores Zoroastrianism—Manichaeism a Zoroastrian heresy—Christian account of origin of Manichaeism too late—Manes’ cardinal doctrines Persian—Conflict between Light and Darkness—Satan and the First Man—Defeat of latter and creation of Universe—The Redemption of the Light—Birth and ancestry of Adam—Jesus sent as Saviour to Adam—Infidelity of Eve and its results—Likeness of these to Mandaite stories—Rôles of Buddha, Zoroaster, and Jesus in Manichaeism—The salvation and transmigration of souls—The death of the perfect righteous—Of the Hearer—Distinction between Perfect and Hearer peculiar to Manichaeism—Obligations of Hearers—Hatred of Manes for Jews—Manes aims at syncretic religion—MSS. found at Turfan prove chameleon-like character of Manichaeism—Manichaeans are Christians among Christians, Buddhists among Buddhists—Manichaean Cosmogony and Anthropogony in Bar Khôni and the Turkestan MSS.—-Organization of Manichaean Church—Ritual of Manichaeans confined to prayers and hymns—Manichaean prayers from Mahommedan sources—Khuastuanift or Manichaean Litany from Turkestan given with commentary—Perfect redeem Light by eating food—Hearers’ fasts help scheme of redemption—Sacrament among Manichaeans doubtful—Symbolical pictures in Manichaean Churches—Festivals of the Bema, Christmas, and Sunday—Manichaean Scriptures—Manichaean treatise found at Tunhuang—The two great archangels and the division of the sexes—History of Manichaeism 277-357

CONCLUSION

End of Paganism—Supremacy of Christianity in West—Its borrowings from its defeated rivals—Triumph of Christianity survival of fittest 358-361

Index 362-425

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VII. POST-CHRISTIAN GNOSTICS

It will be seen, from what has been said in the first volume, that, even at the beginning of the Christian era, there was no lack of αἵρεσις or choice of creeds offered to those peoples of the Levant who had outgrown their national religions; and it may be a surprise to many that more notice was not taken by the Christians of the Apostolic age of these early essays at a universal faith. Some writers, indeed, among whom Bishop Lightfoot is perhaps the most notable, have thought that they could detect allusions to them in the Canonical writings, and that by the “worshipping of angels, intruding into those things which man hath not seen, vainly puffed up by the understanding of his flesh[1]” which St Paul condemns in the Epistle to the Colossians, must be understood the teachings of Gnostic sects already in existence[2]. Others have gone further, and think that the Fourth Gospel was itself written under Gnostic influence[3], and that the Apocalypse attributed to the same author vituperates under the name of the Nicolaitans a Christian sect professing Gnostic tenets[4]. Even if this be so, however, the comparatively late date assigned to all these documents[5] must prevent their being received as evidence of what happened in the earliest stage of the Christian Church; and we find no proof that Gnosticism ever seriously competed for popular favour with orthodox Christianity until well into the IInd century[6]. That the first Christians would take little heed either of organized religions like that of the Alexandrian divinities, or of the speculations of the Orphic poets and of such sects as the Simonians is plain, when we consider the way in which their expectation of the Parusia or Second Coming dominated every moment of their lives[7]. They believed with the unquestioning faith of children that their dead Master would presently return to the earth, and that it would then be destroyed to make way for a new state of things in which, while the majority of mankind would be condemned to everlasting fire, His followers should taste all the joys of Paradise. With this before their eyes, they turned, as has been said, their possessions into a common fund[8], they bound themselves together in a strict association for mutual help and comfort, and they set to work to sweep their fellows into the Christian fold with an earnestness and an energy that was the fiercer because the time for its exercise was thought to be so short. “The Lord is at hand and His reward,” a saying which seems to have been a password among them[9], was an idea never absent from their minds, and the result was an outburst of proselytism such as the world till then had never seen.

“They saw,” says a writer who was under no temptation to exaggerate the charity and zeal of the primitive Church, “their fathers and mothers, their sisters and their dearest friends, hurrying onward to that fearful pit, laughing and singing, lured on by the fiends whom they called the gods. They felt as we should feel were we to see a blind man walking towards a river bank.... Who that could hope to save a soul by tears and supplications would remain quiescent as men do now?.... In that age every Christian was a missionary. The soldier sought to win recruits for the heavenly host; the prisoner of war discoursed to his Persian jailer; the slave girl whispered the gospel in the ears of her mistress as she built up the mass of towered hair; there stood men in cloak and beard at street corners who, when the people, according to the manners of the day, invited them to speak, preached, not the doctrines of the Painted Porch, but the words of a new and strange philosophy; the young wife threw her arms round her husband’s neck and made him agree to be baptised, that their souls might not be parted after death[10]....”

How could people thus preoccupied be expected to concern themselves with theories of the origin of a world about to perish, or with the philosophic belief that all the gods of the nations were but varying forms of one supreme and kindly power?

Before the end of the Ist century, however, this belief in the immediate nearness of the Second Coming had died away[11]. The promise that the second Gospel puts into the mouth of Jesus that some of His hearers should not taste of death until they saw the Son of Man come with power[12], had become incapable of fulfilment by the death of the last of those who had listened to Him. Nor were all the converts to the faith which His immediate disciples had left behind them possessed with the same simple faith and mental equipment as themselves[13]. To the poor fishermen and peasants of Judaea had succeeded the slaves and freedmen of great houses—including even Caesar’s own,—some of them professionally versed in the philosophy of the time, and all with a greater or less acquaintance with the religious beliefs of the non-Jewish citizens of the great Roman Empire[14]. The preachings and journeys of St Paul and other missionaries had also brought into the Christian Church many believers of other than Jewish blood, together with the foreign merchants and members of the Jewish communities scattered throughout the Roman world, who were better able than the Jews of Palestine to appreciate the stability and the organized strength of the Roman Empire and to desire an alliance with it. To ask such men, deeply engaged as many of them were in the pursuit of wealth, to join in the temporary communism and other-worldliness practised by the first Christian Church would have been as futile as to expect the great Jewish banking-houses of the present day to sell all that they have and give it to the poor.

Another cause that profoundly altered the views of the early Christian communities must have been the catastrophe and final dispersion of the Jewish nation. Up to the time of the destruction of the Temple of Jerusalem under Titus, the Christians not only regarded themselves as Jews[15], but were looked upon by such of the other subjects of Rome as had happened to have heard of them, as merely one sect the more of a race always factious and given to internal dissensions. Yet even in St Paul’s time, the Christians were exposed to a bitter persecution at the hands of those orthodox Jews who seemed to the Gentile world to be their co-religionists[16], and it is probable that in the outbreak of fanaticism attending the first Jewish war, they suffered severely at the hands of both combatants[17]. The burning of the Temple must also have been a crushing blow to all who looked for a literal and immediate fulfilment of the Messianic hope, and its result was to further accentuate the difference between the Christians and the Jews[18]. Moreover, the hatred and scorn felt by these last for all other members of the human race had now been recognized by the Gentiles[19], and the repeated insurrections attempted by the Jews between the time of Titus and the final war of extermination under Hadrian showed that these feelings were shared by the Jewish communities outside Palestine[20]. It was therefore not at all the time which worldly-wise and prudent men, as many of the later Christian converts were, would choose for identifying themselves with a race which not only repudiated the relationship in the most practical way, but had lately exposed themselves on other grounds to the deserved execration of the civilized world.

It is, then, by no means surprising that some of the new converts should have begun to look about them for some compromise between their recently acquired convictions and the religious beliefs of the Graeco-Roman world in which they had been brought up, and they found this ready to their hand in the pre-Christian sects which we have ventured above to class together under the generic name of Gnostic. In the Orphic poems, they found the doctrine of successive ages of the world, each with its different characteristics, which coincided well enough with the repeated declaration of the Christians that the old world was passing away,—as was indeed the fact since the conquests of Alexander[21]. They found, too, both in the Orphic poems and in the mixed religions like that of the Alexandrian divinities which had sprung from the doctrines taught by these poems, the legend of a god dying and rising again for the salvation of mankind told in a way which had many analogies with the Gospel narratives of the Passion and Resurrection of Jesus[22]. Among the Essenes, too, who may have owed, as has been said above, some of their doctrines to Orphic inspiration, they found all the modest virtues of sobriety, chastity, and mutual help which had already distinguished the Christian Church above all the other religious associations of the time. And among both the Orphics and the Essenes was to be noticed the strained and fanciful system of interpretation by allegory and figure which enabled them to put their own construction upon the words not only of the books of the Jewish Canon, but of those writings which had begun to circulate among the scattered Christian communities as containing the authentic teaching of Jesus and His immediate disciples[23]. Add to this that the Simonians, and no doubt other pre-Christian Gnostic sects of which we have lost all trace, had already shown the mixed populations of the Levant how to reconcile the innovations of a teacher of impressive and commanding personality with their own ancestral traditions[24], and that the many mysteries then diffused throughout the ancient world offered a ready means of propagating new doctrines under cover of secrecy; and it will be seen that most of the sources from which the founders of the great post-Christian sects afterwards drew their systems were then lying open and ready to hand.

The prize which awaited success was, moreover, no mean one. It is sometimes said that the only distinction that awaited a leader of the Church at this time was the distinction of being burned alive[25]. Yet the fear of impeachment to be followed by a still more horrible death never prevented English statesmen in the XVIIth century from struggling with each other for place and power; while the State had not as yet made any serious attempt to suppress the propagation of Christianity by force. On the other hand, a Christian bishop, even at this early date, occupied a position which was really superior to that of most functionaries of the secular State. Gifted with almost complete power over his flock in temporal as well as in spiritual matters, he was at once their judge and their adviser; and, so long as there were Pagan emperors on the throne, the faithful were forbidden to come to any tribunal but his[26]. His judgments, too, had a greater sanction than those of any temporal judge; for while he could not indeed lawfully condemn any of his hearers to death, he had in the sentence of excommunication which he alone could pronounce, the power of cutting them off from eternal life. The adoration with which he was regarded by them also surpassed the respect paid to proconsul or legate[27]; and the literature of the time is full of allusions to the way in which, when brought before the temporal rulers, he was attended by weeping multitudes who crowded round him even in prison, imploring his blessing and kissing his fetters[28]. Hence it is not to be wondered at that such a position was eagerly sought after, that envy of the episcopate was the principal sin against which the Christian writers of the sub-Apostolic age warned their readers[29], and that it is to the disappointment at failing to attain the highest places in the orthodox Church that they ascribe the foundation of all the principal post-Christian sects[30]. Without taking this accusation as literally correct, it is plain that the chance of irresponsible power over those whom they could convince must have proved a most alluring bait to religious-minded persons who were also ambitious and intellectual men of the world[31].

Thus it came about that during the IInd and IIIrd centuries, there arose more than one teacher who set himself to construct a system which should enable its votaries to retain the Hellenistic culture which Alexander’s conquests had spread throughout the whole civilized world with the religious and moral ideas which the enthusiasm and energy of the first Christians had begun to diffuse among the lower classes of citizens[32]. Alexandria, the natural meeting-place between the East and West, was no doubt the scene of the first of these attempts, and the writings of Philo, fortunately still extant, had already shown the way in which the allegorical system of interpretation could be used to this end. That many of the founders of post-Christian Gnostic sects were Alexandrian Jews is the constant tradition of the Christian Church, and is antecedently probable enough[33]. But other Gnostic leaders were certainly not Alexandrians and came from centres sufficiently distant from Egypt to show that the phenomenon was very widely spread, and that the same causes produced the same results in the most distant places and entirely outside the Jewish community. Marcion, the founder of the Marcionite Church, was a native of Pontus. Saturnilus or Saturninus—the name is spelt differently by Irenaeus and Hippolytus—came from Antioch, Theodotus from Byzantium, others, such as Cerdo, and probably Prepon the Syrian, began teaching in Rome, while we hear of a certain Monoimus, who is said to have been an Arab[34]. Most of these are to us merely names, only very brief summaries of the different systems founded or professed by them having been preserved in the heresiologies compiled by the Fathers of the Church both before and immediately after the alliance of the Christian Church with the Roman State under Constantine.

Of these treatises, the two, which, up to about sixty years ago, formed our main sources of information with regard to the Gnostics of the sub-Apostolic age[35], are the writings of St Irenaeus, Bishop of Lyons about the year 177 A.D., and of Epiphanius, Bishop of Constantia in Cyprus, who tells us he wrote in the seventh year of Gratian or 374 A.D. The first of these is considerably later in date than the heresiarchs in refutation of whose doctrines he wrote his five books “against Heresies”; and although he is most probably honest in his account of their tenets, it is evident that Irenaeus was incapable of distinguishing between the opinions of the founders of the sects which he controverts and those of their followers and successors. Epiphanius, on the other hand, wrote when the Catholic Church was already triumphant, and his principal object seems to have been to blacken the memory of those competitors whom she had already outdistanced in the race for popularity and power. Hence he spares no pains to rake together every story which theological hatred and unclean imagination had ever invented against her opponents and rivals; while his contempt for consistency and the rules of evidence show the intellectual depths to which the war which orthodox Christianity had from the first waged against Hellenistic culture had reduced the learning of the age. The language in which he and the other Catholic writers on heresy describe the Gnostics is, indeed, the first and most salient instance of that intolerance for any other opinions than their own, which a recent writer of great authority declares the Apostles and their successors derived from their Jewish nationality[36]. “The first-born of Satan,” “seducers of women,” “savage beasts,” “scorpions,” “ravening wolves,” “demoniacs,” “sorcerers,” and “atheists” were the mildest terms in which Epiphanius and his fellow heresiologists can bring themselves to speak of the sectaries. They afford ample justification for the remark of the philosophic Emperor Julian that “no wild beasts are so hostile to men as Christian sects in general are to one another[37].”

From this lack of trustworthy evidence, the discovery in 1842 at a convent on Mt Athos of eight out of the ten books of the Philosophumena now generally attributed to Hippolytus, Bishop of “Portus Romana” in 230 A.D.[38], seemed likely to deliver us. The work thus recovered bore the title of the Refutation of all Heresies, and did succeed in giving us a fairly clear and coherent account of some twenty Gnostic sects, the very existence of many of which was previously unknown to us. Moreover, it went a good way beyond its predecessors in pointing out that the real origin of all the heretical sects then existing was to be found, not so much in the diabolic inspiration which other writers thought sufficient to account for it, as in the Pythagorean, Platonic, and other philosophies then in vogue, together with the practice of astrology and magic rites which had come to form an important part of all the Pagan religions then popular. It also showed a very extensive and apparently first-hand acquaintance with the works of the Gnostic leaders, and the lengthy quotations which it gives from their writings enable us to form a better idea than we had before been able to do both of what the Gnostic tenets really were and of the arguments by which they were propagated. Unfortunately the text of the Philosophumena has not been able to withstand the assaults of those textual critics who have already reduced the Book of Genesis to a patchwork of several authors writing at widely separate times and places, and writers like Dr. Salmon and Prof. Stähelin have laboured to show that the author of the Philosophumena was taken in by a forger who had himself concocted all the documents which Hippolytus quotes as being the work of different heresiarchs[39]. Their conclusions, although they do not seem to put the matter entirely beyond doubt, have been accepted by many theological writers, especially in Germany, and in the course of the discussion the fact has emerged that the documents quoted can hardly go back to an earlier date than the year 200 A.D.[40] It is therefore unlikely that Hippolytus had before him the actual words of the heresiarchs whom he is endeavouring to refute; and if the Philosophumena were all we had to depend upon, we might despair of knowing what “the great Gnostics of Hadrian’s time” really taught.

The reason for this paucity of documents is also plain enough. “The antidote to the scorpion’s bite,” to use a patristic figure of speech[41], was felt by the early Church to be the actual cautery, and its leaders spared no pains to rout out and burn the writings of the heretics pending the time when they could apply the same treatment to their authors. Even before their alliance with Constantine had put the resources of the State at their disposal, they had contrived to use the secular arm for this purpose. In several persecutions, notably that of Diocletian, which was probably the most severe of them all, the Christian scriptures were particularly sought for by the Inquisitors of the State, and many of the orthodox boasted that they had arranged that the police should find the writings of the heretics in their stead[42]. Later, when it came to the turn of the Christians to dictate imperial edicts, the possession of heretical writings was made punishable with severe penalties[43]. Between orthodox Christian and Pagan it is a wonder that any have survived to us.

A lucky chance, however, has prevented us from being entirely ignorant of what the Gnostics had to say for themselves. In 1851, a MS. which had been known to be in the British Museum since 1778, was published with a translation into a curious mixture of Latin and Greek by the learned Petermann, and turned out to include a sort of Gospel coming from some early Gnostic sect[44]. From a note made on it by a writer who seems to have been nearly contemporary with its scribes, it is known as Pistis Sophia or “Faith-Wisdom”; and the same MS. also contains fragments of other works coming from a cognate source. In 1891, a papyrus in the Bodleian Library at Oxford, which had been brought into this country in 1769 by the traveller Bruce, was also published with a French translation by M. Amélineau, an ex-Abbé who has long made the later Egyptian language his peculiar study, and proved to contain two documents connected with the system disclosed in the Pistis Sophia[45]. Both MSS. are in Coptic of the dialect of the Sahid or Upper Egypt, to which fact they probably owe their escape from the notice of the Byzantine Inquisitors; and they purport to contain revelations as to the next world and the means of attaining salvation therein made by Jesus on His return to earth after the Resurrection. Although these several documents were evidently not all written at one time and place, and cannot be assigned to a single author, the notes and emendations appearing on the MSS. show that most of them must have been in the possession of members of the same school as their composers; and that therefore we have here for the first time direct and authentic evidence of the Gnostic tenets, as put forward by their adherents instead of by their opponents.

The collation of these documents with the excerpts from other Gnostic writings appearing in early writers like Clement of Alexandria who were not professed heresiologists[46], shows that the post-Christian Gnostic sects had more opinions in common than would be gathered from the statements of St Irenaeus, Hippolytus, and Epiphanius, and that they probably fulfilled a real want of the age[47]. All of them seem to have held that there was one Supreme Being, the source of all good, and that matter was inherently malignant and opposed to him. All of them, too, seem to have taught the perfectibility of man’s nature, the salvation of at any rate the majority of mankind, and the possibility of their rising in the scale of being; and all of them held that this was to be effected mainly by means of certain mysteries or sacramental rites which were assumed to have a magical efficacy. All these fundamental characteristics find their origin in the beliefs of the pre-Christian religions and religious associations described above, and doubtless owed much to their influence. But with these, there was now combined for the first time the recognition of the divinity of One who, while appearing upon earth as a man among men, was yet thought by all to be endowed with a greater share of the Divine nature than they. Orpheus, Moses, Homer, and the Jewish prophets had in turn been claimed as religious teachers who were divinely inspired; but Jesus was asserted by every later Gnostic school of whose teachings we have any evidence to have been Himself of higher essence and substance than the rest of mankind[48]. How far this assertion was dictated by the necessity for finding a superhuman authority for the revelation which each Gnostic leader professed to make to his disciples may be open to question; but in view of some contemporary controversies it is well to draw attention to the fact that the Divinity in some shape or other of Jesus, as well as what is now called His “historicity,” was never for a moment called in question during the first three centuries by Gnostic or Catholic. Μονογενής or Monogenes[49]—a word which Catholic writers later confused with Μονογεννητός or “only-begotten,” but which is best represented by the corresponding Latin expression unicus or “unique” (i.e. one of a kind)—is the word in which the Gnostics summed up their conceptions of the nature of Jesus[50].

This belief, however, led to consequences which do not at first sight seem to follow from it. The gods of classical antiquity were indeed supposed to be of like passions with ourselves, and the Greek of Homer’s time never thought it shame to attribute to them jealousy or lust or fear or vanity or any other of the weaknesses which afflict us[51]. But the one feature besides their beauty that distinguished the Greek gods from humanity was their immortality or freedom from death; and if demigods like Heracles were said to have gone through the common experience of mortals, this was held as proof that their apotheosis or deification did not take place until they had left the earth[52]. So much was this the case that the Greeks are said to have been much amused when they first beheld the Egyptians wailing for the death of Osiris, declaring that if he were a god he could not be dead, while if he were not, his death was not to be lamented[53]; and Plutarch, when repeating the story to his countrymen, thought it necessary to explain that in his view the protagonists in the Osiris and Set legend were neither gods nor men, but “great powers” or daemons not yet deified and in the meantime occupying a place between the two[54]. The same difficulty was, perhaps, less felt by the other Mediterranean peoples, among whom, as we have seen, the idea of a god who died and rose again was familiar enough[55]; but the Gnostic leaders must always have had before their eyes the necessity of making Christianity acceptable to persons in possession of that Hellenistic culture which then dominated the world, and which still forms the root of all modern civilization. How, then, were they to account for the fact that their God Jesus, whether they considered Him as the Logos or Word of Philo, or the Monogenes or Unique Power of the Supreme Being, had suffered a shameful death by sentence of the Roman procurator in Judaea?

The many different answers that they gave to this question showed more eloquently than anything else the difficulties with which it was surrounded. Simon, according to Hippolytus, said that Jesus only appeared on earth as a man, but was not really one, and seemed to have suffered in Judaea, although he had not really done so[56]. Basilides the Egyptian, the leader of another sect, held, according to Irenaeus, that the body of Jesus was a phantasm and had no real existence, Simon of Cyrene having been crucified in his stead[57]; while Hippolytus, who seems to have drawn his account of Basilides’ teaching from a different source from that used by his predecessor, makes him say that only the body of Jesus suffered and relapsed into “formlessness[58],” but that His soul returned into the different worlds whence it was drawn. Saturninus, another heresiarch, held, according to both authors, to the phantasmal theory of Jesus’ body, which attained such popularity among other Gnostic sects that “Docetism,” as the opinion was called, came to be looked upon by later writers as one of the marks of heresy[59], and Hippolytus imagines that there were in existence sects who attached such importance to this point that they called themselves simply Docetics[60]. Valentinus, from whose teaching, as we shall see, the principal system of the Pistis Sophia was probably derived, also adhered to this Docetic theory, and said that the body of Jesus was not made of human flesh, but was constructed “with unspeakable art” so as to resemble it, the dove-like form which had descended into it at His baptism leaving it before the Crucifixion[61]. According to Irenaeus, too, Valentinus held that the Passion of Jesus was not intended as an atonement or sacrifice for sin, as the Catholics taught, but merely as a symbol or reflection of something that was taking place in the bosom of the Godhead[62].

Another point in which the chief post-Christian Gnostic sects seem to have resembled one another is the secrecy with which their teachings were surrounded. Following strictly the practice of the various mysteries—the Eleusinian, the Isiac, Cabiric, and others—in which the Mediterranean god, whether called Dionysos, Osiris, Attis, Adonis, or by any other name, was worshipped, none were admitted to a knowledge of their doctrines without undergoing a long, arduous, and expensive course of initiation. More than one Gnostic teacher is said to have told his hearers to conceal from men what they were, or in other words not to let it be known that they were affiliated to the sect[63], and all the Fathers bear witness to the way in which in time of persecution the Gnostics escaped by professing any faith that would satisfy the Roman authorities. By doing so, they laid themselves open to the accusation hurled at them with great virulence by the Church, that their secret rites and doctrines were so filthy as to shock human nature if made public—an accusation which at the first appearance of Christianity had been brought against the Catholics, and which the Church has ever since made use of against any sect which has differed from her, repeating it even at the present day against the Jews and the Freemasons[64]. There is, however, no reason why the accusation should be better founded in one case than in the others; and it is plain in any event that the practice of secrecy when expedient followed directly from the magical ideas which have been shown above to be the foundation of the dogmas of all the pre-Christian Gnostics, besides permeating religions like that of the Alexandrian divinities. The willingness of the post-Christian Gnostics to subscribe to any public profession of faith that might be convenient was no doubt due to the same cause[65]. As has been well said, to the true Gnostic, Paganism, Christianity, and Mahommedanism are merely veils[66]. The secret words and formulas delivered, and the secret rites which the initiate alone knows, are all that is necessary to assure him a distinguished place in the next world; and, armed with these, he can contemplate with perfect indifference all outward forms of worship.

These and other points which the post-Christian Gnostic sects seem to have had in common[67] can therefore be accounted for by their common origin, without accepting the theory of the textual critics that the Fathers had been deceived by an impostor who had made one document do duty several times over. Yet until we have the writings of the heresiarchs actually in our hands, we must always be in doubt as to how far their opinions have been correctly recorded for us. The post-Christian Gnostic sects have been compared with great aptness to the Protestant bodies which have sprung up outside the Catholic Church since the German Reformation[68], and the analogy in most respects seems to be perfect. Yet it would probably be extremely difficult for a bishop of the Church of Rome or of that of England to give within the compass of an heresiology like those quoted above an account of the tenets of the different sects in England and America, without making grave and serious mistakes in points of detail. The difficulty would arise from want of first-hand knowledge, in spite of the invention of printing having made the dissemination of information on such subjects a thousand times more general than in sub-Apostolic times, and of the fact that the modern sects, unlike their predecessors, do not seek to keep their doctrines secret. But the analogy shows us another cause of error. The “Free Churches,” as they are called in modern parlance, have from the outset shown themselves above all things fissiparous, and it is enough to mention the names of Luther, Zwingli, Calvin, Socinus, Wesley, and Chalmers to show how hopelessly at variance the teachings of the founders of sects at first sight are. But in spite of this, there seems to have been always a sort of fluidity of doctrine among them, and hardly any of the Nonconformist sects now profess the dogmas with which they first came into existence. The changes in this respect, however, never involve the borrowing of new tenets from sources external to them all, but seem to be brought about by a sort of interfiltration between one sect and another. Thus, for example, for many centuries after the Reformation the majority of the dissident sects which rejected all connection with the Catholic Church were among the stoutest defenders of the Divinity of Jesus, and the Socinians who held the contrary opinion were in an entirely negligible minority. At the present day, however, the tendency seems to run the other way, and many Nonconformist bodies are leaning towards Unitarian doctrines, although few of them probably have ever heard the name of Socinus. A similar tendency to interpenetration of doctrines early showed itself among the Gnostics; and there can be little doubt that it sometimes led to a fusion or amalgamation between sects of widely differing origin. Hence it is not extraordinary that certain tenets are sometimes recorded by the Fathers as peculiar to one Gnostic leader and sometimes to another, and to trace accurately their descent, it would be necessary to know the exact point in the history of each sect at which such tenets appeared. But the Fathers seldom thought of distinguishing between the opinions of an heresiarch and those of his successors, and the literary habits of the time were not in favour of accurate quotation of documents or even of names[69]. This forms the chief difficulty in dealing with the history of the Gnostic teaching, and although the discovery of fresh documents contemporary with those we now possess would undoubtedly throw additional light upon the subject, it is probable that it will never be entirely overcome.

Generally speaking, however, Gnosticism played a most important part in the history of Christianity. Renan’s view that it was a disease which, like croup, went near to strangling the infant Church is often quoted[70]; but in the long run it is probable that Gnosticism was on the whole favourable to her development. In religion, sentiment often plays a larger part than reason; and any faith which would enable men of weight and influence to continue the religious practices in which they had been brought up, with at the outset but slight modification, was sure of wide acceptance. There seems no doubt that the earlier Gnostics continued to attend the mysteries of the Chthonian deities in Greece and of their Oriental analogues, Osiris, Attis, Adonis, and the like elsewhere, while professing to place upon what they there saw a Christian interpretation[71]. Here they acted like the little leaven that leaveneth the whole lump, and this did much to spread the knowledge of the new faith among those spiritually-minded Gentiles, who would never have felt any interest in Christianity so long as it remained merely a branch of Judaism[72]. Most of them, moreover, sooner or later abandoned their Gnosticism, and became practising members of the Catholic Church, who sometimes went a long way to meet them. As Renan has said, none of them ever relapsed into Paganism[73], and in this way the so-called heresies became at once the feeders of orthodox Christianity and its richest recruiting-ground[74]. They offered in fact an easy road by which the wealthy, the learned, and the highly-placed could pass from Paganism to Christianity without suffering the inconvenience imposed upon the first followers of the Apostles.

On the other hand, it may be argued that the Church in receiving such recruits lost much of that simplicity of doctrine and practice to which it had hitherto owed her rapid and unvarying success. The Gnostics brought with them into their new faith the use of pictures and statues, of incense, and of all the paraphernalia of the worship of the heathen gods. Baptism which, among the Jewish community in which Christianity was born, was an extremely simple rite, to be performed by anybody and entirely symbolical in its character[75], became an elaborate ceremony which borrowed the name as well as many of the adjuncts of initiation into the Mysteries. So, too, the Agape (love-feast) or common meal, which in pre-Christian times was, as we have seen, common to all Greek religious associations unconnected with the State, was transformed by the Gnostics into a rite surrounded by the same provisions for secrecy and symbolizing the same kind of sacrifice as those which formed the central point of the mystic drama at Eleusis and elsewhere. Both these sacraments, as they now came to be called, were thought to be invested with a magical efficacy, and to demand for their proper celebration a priesthood as exclusive as, and a great deal more ambitious than, that of Eleusis or Alexandria. The daring speculations of the Gnostics as to the nature of the godhead and the origin of the world also forced upon the Catholics the necessity of formulating her views on these points and making adhesion to them a test of membership[76]. To do so was possibly to choose the smaller of two evils, yet it can hardly be denied that the result of the differences of opinion thus aroused was to deluge the world with blood and to stay the progress of human knowledge for more than a thousand years[77]. It is said that if Gnosticism had not been forcibly suppressed, as it was directly the Christian priesthood obtained a share in the government of the State, Christianity would have been nothing but a battle-ground for warring sects, and must have perished from its own internal dissensions. It may be so; but it is at least as possible that, if left unmolested, many of the wilder sects would soon have withered away from their own absurdity, and that none of the others would have been able to endure for long. In this respect also, the history of the post-Reformation sects offers an interesting parallel.

Be that as it may, it is plain that the Catholic Church, in devoting her energies to the suppression of the Gnostic heresies, lost much of the missionary power which till then had seemed all-conquering. During the two centuries which elapsed between the siege of Jerusalem under Vespasian and the accession of Aurelian, the Church had raised herself from the position of a tiny Jewish sect to that of the foremost among the many religions of the Roman Empire. A brief but bloody persecution under Diocletian convinced the still Pagan Emperors of the impossibility of suppressing Christianity by force, and the alliance which they were thus driven to conclude with it enabled the Church to use successfully against the Gnostics the arm which had proved powerless against the Catholics[78]. Yet the triumph was a costly one, and was in its turn followed by a schism which rent the Church in twain more effectually than the Gnostic speculations could ever have done. In the West, indeed, the Latin Church was able to convert the barbarians who extinguished the Western half of the Roman Empire; but in the East, Christianity had to give way to a younger and more ardent faith. How far this was due to the means taken by the Church to suppress Gnosticism must still be a matter of speculation, but it is certain that after her first triumph over heresy she gained no more great victories.

Footnote 1:

Col. ii. 18.

Footnote 2:

Lightfoot, St Paul’s Epistle to the Colossians, pp. 90 sqq.

Footnote 3:

So A. Jülicher in Encyc. Bibl. s.v. Gnosis.

Footnote 4:

Irenaeus, op. cit. Bk I. c. 23, p. 214, Harvey. Salmon in Dict. of Christian Biog. s.v. Nicolaitans, thinks this an idea peculiar to Irenaeus alone and not to be found in the older source from which he drew his account of the other Gnostics.

Footnote 5:

The Canonical Apocalypse was probably written after the siege of Jerusalem by Titus in 70 A.D., while the first unmistakable mention we have of St John’s Gospel is by Theophilus of Antioch a hundred years later. Earlier quotations from it are anonymous, i.e. they give the words of the Gospel as in the A.V. but without referring them to any specified author. See Duchesne, Early Christian Church, Eng. ed. pp. 102, 192.

Footnote 6:

Hegesippus, quoted by Eusebius, Hist. Eccl. Bk IV. c. 22, says that the Church was untroubled by heresy until the reign of Trajan.

Footnote 7:

Hegesippus (see last note) in his account of the martyrdom of “James the Brother of the Lord,” op. cit. Bk II. c. 23.

Footnote 8:

See Schmiedel, Encyc. Bibl. s.v. Community of Goods. Cf. Lucian, de Mort. Peregrini, c. XIII, and Mozley’s comments in _Dict. Christian Biog._ s.v. Lucianus.

Footnote 9:

Maran atha. See Epistle of Barnabas, c. XXI.

Footnote 10:

Winwood Reade, op. cit. pp. 237 sqq.

Footnote 11:

Eugène de Faye, “Formation d’un Doctrine de Dieu au IIme Siècle,” R.H.R. t. LXIII. (1911), p. 9. He quotes Harnack in his support.

Footnote 12:

Mark xi. 1.

Footnote 13:

On the ignorance of the first Christian writers, see de Faye, op. cit. p. 4.

Footnote 14:

Origen, cont. Celsum, Bk III. c. 12. Cf. Krüger, La Grande Encyclopédie, Paris, s.v. Gnosticisme.

Footnote 15:

“Those which say they are Jews, but are not”; Rev. ii. 9; ibid. iii. 9. The Clementine Homilies, though of much later date, never speak of the Christians otherwise than as Jews. Cf. Duchesne, Early Christian Church, p. 12.

Footnote 16:

Acts viii. 1.

Footnote 17:

Renan (L’Antéchrist, p. 511, and note 1) gives a passage, which he thinks is from Tacitus, showing that Titus aimed at the suppression of the Christians as well as the Jews. Doubtless many Christians perished in the punitive measures taken in the Ist century against the Jews in Antioch and elsewhere. Cf. Josephus, Wars of the Jews, Bk VII. c. 3; Eusebius, H. E. Bk III. cc. 12, 17, 19, 20. It was the persecution by the fanatical Jews that compelled the flight of the Christians to Pella shortly before the siege. See Eusebius, Bk III. c. 5; Epiph. Haer. XXIX. c. 7, p. 239, Oehler. The episode of the “Woman clothed with the Sun” of the Canonical Apocalypse is supposed by some to refer to this.

Footnote 18:

So that the members of the little Church of Pella who retained the name of Jews gradually ceased to be regarded as orthodox by the other Christian communities and were called Ebionites. See Renan, L’Antéchrist, p. 548. Cf. Fuller in Dict. Christian Biog. s.v. Ebionites for authorities. The connection that Fuller would find between the Essenes and the Ebionites seems to rest on little proof.

Footnote 19:

Thus Mgr Duchesne, op. cit. p. 14, says that “St Paul was a Jew by birth, imbued with the exclusiveness and disdainful spirit which inspired his race and influenced all their dealings with other nations.”

Footnote 20:

Many of the Sicarii and other fanatics managed to escape before the catastrophe of the First Jewish War to Egypt and the Cyrenaica, where they continued to commit outrages and make rebellion until they brought on themselves and their co-religionists the wrath of the Romans. See Josephus, Wars, Bk VII. cc. 10, 11. Cf. Renan, L’Antéchrist, p. 539; id., Les Évangiles, p. 369.

Footnote 21:

Abel’s Orphica, Frgs. 243-248, especially the quotation from Nigidius.

Footnote 22:

See Chapter II, supra.

Footnote 23:

So Renan, L’Antéchrist, p. 300, says that the Synoptic Gospels probably first took shape in the Church at Pella. Thus he explains the so-called “little Apocalypse” of Matthew xxiv., Mark xiii., and Luke xxi. Cf. ibid., p. 296 and note. For the symbolic construction placed upon them by the Gnostics, see Hatch, H. L., p. 75.

Footnote 24:

Hegesippus, who probably wrote about 150 A.D., speaks of Thebuthis, Dositheus, and others as leaders of early sects. Eusebius, Hist. Eccl. Bk IV. c. 22, and Origen (cont. Cels. Bk VI. c. 11) make this last a contemporary of Simon Magus. The Clementine Homilies (Bk II. c. 24), from whom both authors may have derived their information, have a long story about Dositheus being with Simon a follower of John the Baptist, and disputing with Simon the headship of the sect. From presumably other sources, Hegesippus speaks of the Essenes, the Masbothoeans and the Hemero-baptists, for which last see Chapter XIII, infra, as pre-Christian sects.

Footnote 25:

Winwood Reade, op. cit. p. 244. Probably this is what is meant by Gibbon when he says (Decline and Fall, Bury’s ed. III. p. 153, n. 54) that no future bishop of Avila is likely to imitate Priscillian by turning heretic, because the income of the see is 20,000 ducats a year.

Footnote 26:

Apostolical Constitutions, Bk II. cc. 45, 46, 47. Harnack, Expansion of Christianity, Eng. ed. II. p. 98 n. 1, gives the date of this work as “middle of the 2nd century.” Duchesne, op. cit. p. 109, thinks it is derived from the Didache which he puts not later than Trajan.

Footnote 27:

Apost. Const. Bk II. c. 26: “He (i.e. the bishop) is your ruler and governor; he is your king and potentate; he is next after God, your earthly divinity, who has a right to be honoured by you.”

Footnote 28:

Lucian, Proteus Peregrinus, passim; Acts of Paul and Thekla; Acts of Peter of Alexandria.

Footnote 29:

Clement of Rome, First Epistle to the Corinthians, c. 44.

Footnote 30:

So Irenaeus, op. cit. Bk I. c. 26, pp. 219, 220, Harvey, says it was the desire to become a διδάσκαλος or teacher that drove Tatian, once a hearer of Justin Martyr’s, into heresy. Hegesippus, ubi cit. supra, says that Thebuthis first corrupted the Church, on account of his not being made a bishop. For the same accusation in the cases of Valentinus and Marcion, see Chapters IX and XI, infra.

Footnote 31:

Celsus apud Origen (op. cit. Bk III. cc. 10, 11) says: “Christians at first were few in number, and all held like opinions, but when they increased to a great multitude, they were divided and separated, each wishing to have his own individual party; for this was their object from the beginning”—a contention which Origen rebuts.

Footnote 32:

Thus in Egypt it was almost exclusively the lower classes which embraced Christianity at the outset. See Amélineau, “Les Actes Coptes du martyre de St Polycarpe” in P.S.B.A. vol. X. (1888), p. 392. Julian (Cyr. VI. p. 206) says that under Tiberius and Claudius there were no converts of rank.

Footnote 33:

Thus Cerinthus, who is made by tradition the opponent of St John, is said to have been a Jew and to have been trained in the doctrines of Philo at Alexandria (Theodoret, Haer. Fab. Bk II. § 3). Cf. Neander, Ch. Hist. (Eng. ed.) vol. II. pp. 42-47. Neander says the same thing about Basilides (op. cit. p. 47 and note) and Valentinus (p. 71), although it is difficult to discover any authority for the statement other than the Jewish features in their doctrines. There is more evidence for the statement regarding Marcus, the heresiarch and magician whom Irenaeus (op. cit. Bk I. c. 7) accuses of the seduction of Christian women, apparently in his own time, since the words of Marcus’ ritual, which the Bishop of Lyons quotes, are in much corrupted Hebrew, and the Jewish Cabala was used by him. Renan’s view (Marc Aurèle, pp. 139 sqq.) that Christianity in Egypt never passed through the Judaeo-Christian stage may in part account for the desire of Jewish converts there to set up schools of their own.

Footnote 34:

For Marcion, see Chapter XI, infra. Summary accounts of the doctrines of other Gnostics mentioned are given by Irenaeus and Hippolytus in the works quoted. See also the Dict. of Christian Biog., under their respective names.

Footnote 35:

The lesser heresiologists, such as Philaster of Brescia, St Augustine, the writer who is known as Praedestinatus, the author of the tract Adversus omnes Haereses wrongly ascribed to Tertullian, and the other writers included in the first volume of Oehler’s Corpus Haereseologici, Berlin, 1856, as well as writers like Eusebius, all copy from one or other of these sources. The Excerpta Theodoti appended to the works of Clement of Alexandria are on a different footing, but their effect at the time spoken of in the text was not appreciated. Cf. Salmon in Dict. Christian Biog. s.v. Valentinus.

Footnote 36:

Bouché-Leclercq, L’Intolérance Religieuse et Politique, Paris, 1912, p. 140.

Footnote 37:

Ammianus Marcellinus, Bk XXII. c. 5, § 4.

Footnote 38:

An excellent and concise account of the discovery and the subsequent controversy as to the authorship of the book is given by Salmon in the Dict. Christian Biog. s.v. Hippolytus Romanus. For Mgr Duchesne’s theory that Hippolytus was a schismatic Pope, see his Hist. Christian Church, pp. 227-233.

Footnote 39:

Salmon’s position is set out by him in Hermathena, Dublin, 1885, pp. 389 sqq. For Stähelin’s, see his tractate Die Gnostische Quellen Hippolyts, Leipzig, 1890, in Harnack’s Texte und Untersuchungen. Both are skilfully summarized by de Faye in his Introduction à l’Étude du Gnosticisme, Paris, 1903, pp. 25 sqq.

Footnote 40:

De Faye does not accept Stähelin’s contention as to the forgery, but his conclusion as to the date is as stated in the text. See Introduction, etc. pp. 68, 71.

Footnote 41:

Tertullian, Scorpiace, c. 1.

Footnote 42:

Neander, Ch. Hist. (Eng. ed.), I. p. 208, quotes a case from St Augustine which I have not been able to verify.

Footnote 43:

Gibbon, Decline and Fall, II. p. 110 and note 144 (Bury’s ed.). For the search which the Christian emperors directed to be made for the heretics’ books, see Eusebius, Vita Constantini, Bk III. cc. 64, 65.

Footnote 44:

The actual transcription and translation were made by Maurice Schwartze, a young German who was sent over here to study the documents in the British Museum at the expense of the King of Prussia. He died after the completion of his task, and before the book could be printed.

Footnote 45:

Amélineau’s transcription and translation appeared in the Notices et Extraits, etc. of the Académie des Inscriptions, t. XXIX. pt 2 (Paris, 1891). He has also published a translation into French without text of the Pistis Sophia (Paris, 1895). Dr Carl Schmidt, of the University of Berlin, has published translations into German of both works under the title Koptisch-Gnostische Schriften, Bd I., Leipzig, 1905. None of these versions are entirely satisfactory, and it is much to be wished that an authoritative edition of the two works could be put forward by English scholars. The present writer gave a short history and analysis of them in the Scottish Review for 1893 under the title “Some Heretic Gospels.”

Footnote 46:

Clement was so far from being a heresiologist that he has not escaped the reproach of being himself a heretic. He repeatedly speaks in praise of the “true Gnostic,” meaning thereby the perfect Christian, and although this is probably a mere matter of words, it seems to have induced Photius in the IXth century to examine his writings with a jealous eye. The result was that, as M. Courdaveaux points out (R.H.R. 1892, p. 293 and note), he found him guilty of teaching that matter was eternal, the Son a simple creature of the Father, the Incarnation only an appearance, that man’s soul entered several bodies in succession, and that several worlds were created before that of Adam. All these are Gnostic opinions, and it may be that if we had all Clement’s books in our hands, as had Photius, we might confirm M. Courdaveaux’s judgment, as does apparently Mgr Duchesne. Cf. his Hist. of Christian Ch. pp. 244, 245.

Footnote 47:

Cf. A. C. McGiffert, Prolegomena to the Church History of Eusebius (Schaff and Wace’s Nicene Library), Oxford, 1890, vol. I. p. 179 and note.

Footnote 48:

Of the heresies mentioned in the Philosophumena only two, viz. that of Simon Magus and that of those whom Hippolytus calls the Sethiani, do not admit, either expressly or by implication, the divinity of Jesus. This may be accounted for by what has been said above as to both being pre-Christian in origin.

Footnote 49:

E.g. Irenaeus, op. cit. Bk I. c. 1, I. p. 9, Harvey. Here he is called ὅμοιος τε καὶ ἴσος τῷ προβαλόντι, “like and equal to him who had sent him forth.” There is certainly here no allusion to “begetting” in the ordinary sense of the word.

Footnote 50:

As in the epithet of Persephone in the Orphic Hymn quoted above. See Chapter IV, supra. The unanimity with which all post-Christian Gnostics accepted the superhuman nature of Jesus seems to have struck Harnack. See his What is Christianity? Eng. ed. 1904, pp. 209, 210.

Footnote 51:

Iliad I. ll. 560 sqq.; IV. ll. 57, 330; XIV. ll. 320 sqq.

Footnote 52:

Odyssey XI. ll. 600 sqq.; Plutarch, Life of Pelopidas, c. XVI.

Footnote 53:

Plutarch, de Is. et Os. c. LXXI.

Footnote 54:

Ibid. cc. XXV., XXVII., XXX.

Footnote 55:

Probably this was one of the reasons why the Mysteries which showed the death of a god had in Greece to be celebrated in secret. See Diodorus’ remark (Bk V. c. 77, § 3) that the things which the Greeks only handed down in secret were by the Cretans concealed from no one.

Footnote 56:

Hippolytus, op. cit. Bk VI. c. 19, p. 265, Cruice.

Footnote 57:

Irenaeus, op. cit. Bk I. c. 19, II. p. 200, Harvey.

Footnote 58:

ἀμορφία. Hippolytus, op. cit. Bk VII. c. 27, p. 366, Cruice.

Footnote 59:

Irenaeus, op. cit. Bk I. c. 18, p. 197, Harvey. Hippolytus, op. cit. Bk VII. c. 28, p. 368, Cruice.

Footnote 60:

Hippolytus, op. cit. Bk VIII. c. 8.

Footnote 61:

Irenaeus, op. cit. Bk I. c. 1, § 13, pp. cxli and 61, Harvey.

Footnote 62:

Ibid. Bk I. c. 1, § 31, pp. cxli and 62, Harvey.

Footnote 63:

Irenaeus, op. cit. Bk I. c. 19, § 3, p. 202, Harvey; Hippolytus, op. cit. Bk IV. c. 24, p. 225, Cruice; Tertullian, Scorpiace, c. I.

Footnote 64:

For the accusation against the Christians, see Athenagoras, Apologia, cc. III., XXXI.; Justin Martyr, First Apol. c. XXVI. For that against the Jews, Strack, Le Sang et la fausse Accusation du Meurtre Rituel, Paris, 1893. For that against the Freemasons, “Devil Worship and Freemasonry,” Contemporary Review for 1896.

Footnote 65:

See n. 1, supra. So Eusebius speaks of the Simonians receiving baptism and slipping into the Church without revealing their secret tenets, Hist. Eccl. Bk II. c. 1.

Footnote 66:

Revillout, Vie et Sentences de Secundus, Paris, 1873, p. 3, n. 1.

Footnote 67:

Amélineau, Le Gnosticisme Égyptien, p. 75, thus enumerates them: the doctrine of emanation, an unknown [i.e. an inaccessible and incomprehensible] God, the resemblance of the three worlds, the aeonology of Simon, and a common cosmology. To this may be added the inherent malignity of matter and the belief in salvation by knowledge. See Krüger, La Grande Encyclopédie, s.v. Gnosticisme.

Footnote 68:

Renan, Mare Aurèle, p. 114.

Footnote 69:

Witness the confusion between Ennoia and Epinoia in Chapter VI, vol. I. p. 180, n. 4, supra, and between Saturnilus and Saturninus in this chapter, p. 9. So Irenaeus and others record the opinions of an associate of Marcus whom they call “Colarbasus,” a name which modern criticism has shown to be a mistake for קול ארבע Kol-arba, “The Voice of the Four” or the Supreme Tetrad. See Renan, Mare Aurèle, p. 129; Hort in Dict. Christian Biog. s.h.v. So Clement of Alexandria, Protrept. c. II. mistakes Evoe, the mystic cry of the Bacchantes, for the Eve of Genesis.

Footnote 70:

Renan, L’Église Chrétienne, p. 140.

Footnote 71:

Hippolytus, op. cit. Bk V. c. 9, p. 177, Cruice.

Footnote 72:

As in the case of Clement of Alexandria, who seems to have been initiated into most of the heathen mysteries then current. It is to be noted, too, that Origen, although he speaks of the Ophites as an insignificant sect (see Chapter VIII, infra), yet professes to know all about their secret opinions.

Footnote 73:

Renan, Marc Aurèle, p. 139.

Footnote 74:

Thus Ambrose of Milan had been before his conversion a Valentinian, Epiphanius a Nicolaitan. See Eusebius, H.E. Bk VI. c. 18; Epiph. Haer. XXVI. c. 17, p. 198, Oehler.

Footnote 75:

It could be even self-administered, as in the Acts of Paul and Thekla, where Thekla baptizes herself in the arena. See Tischendorf’s text. The Clementine Homilies (Bk XIV. c. 1) show that it could be immediately followed by the Eucharist without any intermediate rite or preparation. Contrast with this the elaborate ceremonies described by Cyril of Jerusalem, where the white-robed band of converts after a long catechumenate, including fasting and the communication of secret doctrines and passwords, approach on Easter Eve the doors of the church where the lights turned darkness into day. See Hatch, H. L. pp. 297, 299.

Footnote 76:

Duchesne, Hist. Christian Ch. p. 32; Harnack, What is Christianity? Eng. ed. p. 210.

Footnote 77:

As Hatch, H. L. pp. 274-279, has pointed out, the term όμοοὐσιος, which led to so much shedding of Christian blood, first occurs among the post-Christian Gnostics, and led in turn to most of the wranglings about “substance,” “person,” and the other metaphysical distinctions and their result in “strife and murder, the devastation of fair fields, the flame of fire and sword” (ibid. p. 279). For the possibilities of Greek science, had it not been opposed by the Church, see ibid. p. 26.

Footnote 78:

See the edict of Constantine, which Eusebius (Vit. Constantini, cc. LXIV., LXV.) quotes with unholy glee, prohibiting the Gnostics from presuming to assemble together either publicly or privately, and commanding that their “houses of prayer” should be confiscated and handed over to the Catholic Church. Eusebius (ibid. c. LXVI.) says that the result of this was that the “savage beasts crept secretly into the Church,” and continued to disseminate their doctrines by stealth. Perhaps such a result was to be expected.

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VIII. POST-CHRISTIAN GNOSTICS: THE OPHITES

Although the Ophites were one of the most widely-spread and in some respects the most interesting of the heretical sects which came to light after the foundation of the Christian Church, we know nothing at first hand about their origin. Philastrius, or Philaster of Brescia, writing about 380 A.D., includes them among those “who taught heresies before the Coming of Christ[79]”; but the phrase does not perhaps bear its apparent meaning, and the late date at which he wrote makes it unlikely that he possessed any exclusive evidence on the point. A more plausible tradition, which is common to St Augustine[80], to the tractate Against All Heresies which passes under the name of Tertullian[81], and to the similar one attributed to St Jerome[82], is that the Ophites derived their doctrines from Nicolaus or Nicolas of Antioch, the deacon mentioned in the Acts[83], and that they are therefore alluded to under the name of Nicolaitans[84] in the address to the Church of Ephesus in the Canonical Apocalypse. Origen, on the other hand, in his Discourse against Celsus says that they boasted of one Euphrates as their founder[85]; while Hippolytus declares that their tenets were said by themselves to be due to “the very numerous discourses which were handed down by James the brother of the Lord to Mariamne[86].” From which contradictory statements we may gather that the “heresy” of the Ophites was, even as early as 230 A.D., a very old one, which may have appeared even before Christianity began to show its power, and that it was probably born in Asia Minor and owed much to the Pagan religions there practised and little or nothing to any dominant personality as did the systems of Simon Magus and the heresies treated of in the succeeding chapters.

It is also probable that between the time when the Canonical Apocalypse was written and that of Origen and Hippolytus[87], the Ophites altered their doctrines more than once. We may not be able to go so far as their historian, Father Giraud, who thinks that he can distinguish between their earlier opinions, which he would attribute to the Naassenes or Ophites[88] described by Hippolytus, and those of a later school to which he would assign the name of Ophites specially[89]. Yet many of the Fathers confuse their doctrines with those of the Sethians, the Cainites, and other sects which seem to have had some distinguishing features[90]; while Hippolytus, who shows a more critical spirit than the other heresiologists, says expressly that the other heresies just named were little different in appearance from this one, being united by the same spirit of error[91]. The confusion is further increased by his statement that the Naassenes called themselves Gnostics, although Carpocrates’ followers, who must have been later in time, are elsewhere said to be the first to adopt this name[92]. For there was at least one other sect of heretics who did the same thing, and to whom Epiphanius in his Panarion attributes, together with a theological and cosmological system not unlike that hereafter described, mysteries of unnameable obscenity with which the Ophites were never charged[93]. In this respect it may be as well to remember the words of Tertullian that the heretics

“know no respect even for their own leaders. Hence it is that schisms seldom happen among heretics because, even when they exist, they do not appear; for their very unity is schism. I am greatly in error,” he continues, “if they do not amongst themselves even diverge from their own rules, since every man, as it suits his own temper, modifies the traditions he has received after the same fashion as did he who handed them down to him, when he moulded them according to his own free will.... What was allowed to Valentinus is allowable to the Valentinians, and that is lawful for the Marcionites which Marcion did, i.e. to innovate on the faith according to his own judgment. In short, all heresies when investigated are found to be in many particulars disagreeing with their own authors[94].”

If Tertullian was right, it is idle to expect that after the lapse of nineteen centuries we can hope to distinguish between the opinions of an heresiarch and those of his followers who differed from or improved upon his teaching.

Of the country in which the Ophites first appeared, and where to the last they had their strongest following, there can, however, be little doubt. Phrygia, by which is meant the entire central part of Asia Minor or, to use its modern name, Anatolia, must from its situation have formed a great meeting-place for different creeds, among which that of the Jews occupied in the first centuries of our era a prominent place. Seleucus Nicator had followed the example of Alexander in Egypt in granting the Jews full rights of citizenship in all his cities, and Antiochus the Great took even more practical steps towards inducing them to settle there when he transported thither two thousand Jewish families from Mesopotamia and Babylon[95]. These Jews of the Eastern Diaspora or Dispersion had, however, by no means kept whole the faith of their forefathers, and there seems in consequence to have been less racial hatred between them and the earlier inhabitants of the country here than elsewhere[96]. In religious matters, these last, too, seem to have been little affected by the Euhemerism that had destroyed the faith of the more sophisticated Greeks, and the orgiastic worship of Cybele, Attis, and Sabazius found in Phrygia its principal seat. The tendency of the inhabitants towards religious hysteria was not likely to be lessened by the settlement in the centre of Asia Minor of the Celtic tribes known as the Galatae, who had gradually passed under the Roman yoke in the time of Augustus, but seem long to have retained their Celtic taste for innovations in religious matters, and to have supplied from the outset an endless number of heresies to the Church[97]. Moreover, in the Wars of Succession which followed the death of Alexander, Phrygia had been bandied about like a shuttlecock between Antigonus and Lysimachus; in the decadence of the Seleucid house, it had been repeatedly harried by the pretenders to the Syrian crown; and it had, during the temporary supremacy of Mithridates and his son-in-law Tigranes, been subject to the tyranny of the Armenians[98]. Thanks to the policy of these barbarian kings, it had in great measure been denuded of its Greek-speaking inhabitants[99], the growth of its towns had been checked, and the country seems to have been practically divided among a crowd of dynasts or priest-kings, generally the high-priests of temples possessing vast landed estates and preserving their importance by the celebration of yearly festivals. Dr Mahaffy compares these potentates with the prince-bishops and lordly abbots produced by nearly the same conditions in mediaeval Europe[100], and Sir William Ramsay’s and Mr Hogarth’s researches of late years in Anatolia have shown how much truth there is in the comparison.

The religion practised by these priest-kings throughout the whole of Asia Minor differed slightly in form, but was one in substance[101]. It was in effect the worship of the bisexual and mortal gods whom we have already seen worshipped under varying names in the Eastern basin of the Mediterranean. These deities, whose alternate appearance as male and female, infant and adult, could only be explained to Western ears as the result of incestuous unions, could all on final analysis be reduced to one great divinity in whom all Nature was contained. The essence of the Anatolian religion, says Sir William Ramsay, when describing the state of things that existed in Phrygia immediately before the preaching of St Paul, was

“the adoration of the life of Nature—that life apparently subject to death, yet never dying, but reproducing itself in new forms, different and yet the same. This perpetual self-identity under varying forms, this annihilation of death through the power of self-reproduction, was the object of an enthusiastic worship, characterized by remarkable self-abandonment and immersion in the divine, by a mixture of obscene symbolism and sublime truths, by negation of the moral distinctions and family ties that exist in a more developed society, but do not exist in the free life of Nature. The mystery of self-reproduction, of eternal unity amid temporary diversity, is the key to explain all the repulsive legends and ceremonies that cluster round that worship, and all the manifold manifestations or diverse embodiments of the ultimate single divine life that are carved on the rocks of Asia Minor[102].”

Whether the Phrygians of Apostolic times actually saw all these sublime ideas underlying the religion of their country may be doubted; but it is fairly certain that at the time in question there was worshipped throughout Anatolia a divine family comprising a goddess known as the Mother of the Gods, together with a male deity, who was at once her son, her spouse, her brother, and sometimes her father[103]. The worship of this pair, who were in the last resort considered as one bisexual being, was celebrated in the form of festivals and mystery-plays like those of the Middle Ages, in which the birth, nuptials, death, and resurrection of the divinities were acted in dramatic form. At these festivals, the worshippers gave themselves up to religious excitement alternating between continence sometimes carried to the extent of self-mutilation on the part of the men, and hysterical or religious prostitution on the part of the women[104]. The gathering of foreign merchants and slaves in the Anatolian cities, and the constant shifting of their inhabitants by their successive masters, had forced on the votaries of these Phrygian deities a theocrasia of the most complete kind, and the Phrygian god and goddess were in turn identified with the deities of Eleusis, of whom indeed they may have been the prototypes, with the Syrian Aphrodite and Adonis, with the Egypto-Greek Serapis and Isis, and probably with many Oriental deities as well[105]. At the same time, their fame and their worship had spread far beyond Phrygia. The primitive statue of the goddess of Pessinus, a black stone or baetyl dignified by the name of the Mother of the Gods, was transported to Rome in the stress of the Second Punic War and there became the centre of a ritual served by eunuch priests supported by the State[106]; while, later, her analogue, the Syrian goddess, whose temple at Hierapolis, according to Lucian, required a personnel of over three hundred ministrants, became the object of the special devotion of the Emperor Nero[107]. As with the Alexandrian divinities, the respect paid to these stranger deities by the legions carried their worship into every part of the Roman world[108].

The element which the Jews of Asia contributed to Anatolian religion at this period was probably more important than has been generally supposed. M. Cumont’s theory that the epithet of the “Highest” (Ὕψιστος) often applied to the God of Anatolia and Syria really covers the personality of Yahweh of Israel rests upon little proof at present[109]. It may be conceded that the tendency to monotheism—or to speak strictly their hatred for the worshippers of many gods—rooted in the Jews from the Captivity onwards may at first have done much to hasten the progress of the theocrasia which was welding all the gods of the Mysteries into one great God of Nature. But the Babylonian or Oriental Jews, called in the Talmud and elsewhere the Ten Tribes, probably had some inborn sympathy with the more or less exalted divinities of the West. Even in the temple of Jerusalem, Ezekiel sees in his vision “women weeping for Tammuz[110],” while Jeremiah complains of the Jews making cakes to the Queen of Heaven, which seems to be another name for the Mother of the Gods[111]. The feminine side of the Anatolian worship can therefore have come to them as no new thing. Perhaps it was due to this that they so soon fell away from their ancestral faith, and that, in the words of the Talmud, “the baths and wines of Phrygia separated the Ten Tribes from their brethren[112].” That their collection of money for the Temple in Roman times was due not so much to any religious motive, as to some of the financial operations in which the Jews were always engaging, Cicero hints with fair plainness in his Oration in defence of Flaccus[113]. They seem, too, to have intermarried freely with the Greek citizens, while the sons of these mixed marriages did not undergo the circumcision which the Jews of the Western Dispersion demanded not only from native Jews but also from proselytes of alien blood[114].

The Jews also brought with them into Phrygia superstitions or side-beliefs to which they were probably much more firmly attached than to their national religion. The practice of magic had always been popular among the Chosen People as far back as the time of Saul, and the bowls inscribed with spells against enchantments and evil spirits form almost the only relics which they have left in the mounds which mark their settlement at Hilleh on the site of the ancient Babylon[115]. From this and other evidence, it would seem that the Babylonian Jews had borrowed from their Chaldaean captors many of their views as to the importance of the Name in magic, especially when used for the purposes of exorcism or of spells; that they thought the name of their national god Yahweh particularly efficacious; and that the different names of God used in the Old Testament were supposed, according to a well-known rule in magic, to be of greater efficiency as the memory of their meaning and actual significance died out among them[116]. The Babylonian Jews, moreover, as is evident from the Book of Daniel, no sooner found themselves among the well-to-do citizens of a great city than they turned to the professional practice of divination and of those curious arts whereby they could make a living from the credulity of their Gentile neighbours without the manual labour always dreaded by them[117]. Hence Phrygia, like the rest of Asia Minor during the Apostolic Age, was full of strolling Jewish sorcerers who undertook for money to cast out devils, to effect and destroy enchantments, to send and interpret dreams, and to manufacture love philtres[118]. That in doing so they made great use of the name of their national deity seems plain from Origen’s remark that “not only do those belonging to the Jewish nation employ in their prayers to God and in the exorcising of demons the words: God of Abraham and God of Isaac and God of Jacob, but so also do most of those who occupy themselves with magical rites. For there is found in treatises on magic in many countries such an invocation of God and assumption of the divine name, as implies a familiar use of it by these men in their dealings with demons[119].” This is abundantly borne out by the spells preserved for us by the Magic Papyri before mentioned, where the expressions “God of Abraham,” “God of Isaac,” “God of Jacob” constantly occur. One spell given above contains, as we have seen, along with many unfamiliar expressions drawn from Greek, Persian, Egyptian, and even Sumerian sources, the words “Blessed be the Lord God of Abraham[120],” and in nearly every one do we find the Tetragrammaton or four-lettered name of God transliterated in the A.V. Jehovah, either with or without some of the other Divine names used in the Old Testament. The names of the angels Gabriel, Michael, and Raphael given in the Old Testament and the Apocrypha are also common in all this literature[121].

Did the Babylonian Jews bring with them into Phrygia any theory of the universe other than the direct and unfettered rule of Jehovah and the creation of the world from nothing, which they gathered from their sacred books? There is little evidence on the point, save some expressions of doubtful import in the Magic Papyri[122] and the statement of Origen that “the name Sabaoth, and Adonai and the other names treated with so much reverence among the Hebrews ... belong to a secret theology which refers to the Framer of all things[123].” It might be possible to deduce from this that the elaborate system known as the Cabala or secret tradition of the Jews was already in existence[124]. This system, on its theoretical or speculative side, attempts to explain the existence of the physical universe by postulating a whole series of intermediate powers emanating from the Supreme Being of whom they are the attributes or names; while, on the other or “practical,” it professes to perform wonders and to reveal mysteries by a childish juggling with letters in the shape of anagrams and acrostics or with their numerical values[125]. As has been said above, follies of this last-named kind were unknown neither to the later Orphics nor to the primitive Church, and might well be thought to have been acquired by the Jews during their stay in Babylon, where the Semitic inhabitants seem from a very early date and for magical reasons to have used numbers instead of letters in writing the names of their gods[126]. It would not have been difficult for them to have acquired at the same time from the Persian masters of Babylon the doctrine of emanation instead of creation which is to be found in the Zend Avesta as well as in all the post-Christian Gnostic systems. But there are other channels besides the Anatolian religion through which these ideas might have come into the West[127], and it will be better not to lay any stress upon this. That the Cabala in the complete form in which it appears in the books known as the Sepher Jetzirah and the Sepher Zohar does not go further back than the VIth or VIIth century of our era, seems to be the opinion of all those best qualified to judge in the matter. M. Isidore Loeb, who has given the most coherent and compact summary of Cabalistic teaching that has appeared of late years, finds its germs in Babylonian Judaism at about the same period which saw the blossoming of the Christian Gnostic sects, without going so far as to derive either of the later doctrines from the other[128].

However this may be, there is a fair consensus of opinion among the Fathers of the Church as to the doctrines current among those whom, for reasons to be presently seen, they called the Ophites or worshippers of the Serpent. The aim of the sect seems to have been to produce an eclectic system which should reconcile the religious traditions current from time immemorial in Western Asia with the worship of the Hellenized gods of Asia Minor, and the teachings of the already powerful Christian Church. With this view they went back to what is probably the earliest philosophical theory of the origin of the universe, and declared that before anything was, there existed God, but God conceived as an infinite ocean of divinity, too great and too remote to be apprehended by man’s intelligence, of whom and of whose attributes nothing could be known or said, and who could only be likened to a boundless sea. Something like this was the view of the earliest inhabitants of Babylonia, who declared that before heaven or earth or the gods came into being there was nothing but a vast waste of waters[129]. At some time or another, the same idea passed into Egypt, when the Egyptians attributed the beginning of things to Nu or the primaeval deep[130]; and it was probably the spread of this tradition into Ionia which induced Thales of Miletus, the earliest of the Ionian philosophers, to assert that water was the first of all things[131]. This unknowable and inaccessible power, the Ophites declared to be ineffable or impossible to name, and he was only referred to by them as Bythos or the Deep. The same idea and the same name were adopted by most of the later Gnostics[132].

From this unknowable principle or Father (Πατὴρ ἄγνωστος) there shone forth, according to the Ophites, a Primordial Light, infinite and incorruptible, which is the Father of all things subsequent to him[133]. Here they may have been inspired, not by the Babylonian, but by its derivative, the Jewish tradition given in the Book of Genesis[134]. But this Light was in effect, though not in name, the chief god of their system, and in Asia Minor the gods had never perhaps been imagined as existing in any but human form. Accordingly they described this Light as the First Man, meaning thereby no terrestrial creature, but a heavenly or archetypal man in whose likeness mankind was afterwards made[135]. From him came forth a second Light sometimes called his Ennoia or Thought, which expression seems to cover the idea that this Second Man or Son of Man, by both which names he was known to the Ophites, was not begotten in the ordinary way of mortals, but was produced from the First Man as a thought or concept is formed in the brain[136]. Or we may, to take another metaphor, regard this Ennoia as the rays of light which emanate or flow forth from a lamp or other source of light, but which have no independent existence and still remain connected with their parent. Such was the Ophite idea with regard to the two great Lights or the First and Second Man whom they refused to consider as separate, giving them both the name of Adamas, or the Unconquered, a classical epithet of the Hades already identified at Eleusis with Dionysos[137]. They also called them, as will be seen later, the Father-and-Son. In this, perhaps, they did not go outside the conception of the Anatolian religion, which always represented the Divine Son as the spouse of the goddess who gave him birth, and in this way eternally begetting himself. Thus, the Phrygian goddess Cybele under the name of Agdistis was said to be violently enamoured of Atys who was in effect her own son[138]. The same idea was familiar to the Egyptians, among whom more than one god is described as the “bull (i.e. male or husband) of his mother,” and it may thus have passed into the Alexandrian religion, where Horus was, as we have seen, often given instead of Osiris as the lover of Isis[139]. At Eleusis it was more modestly concealed under the myth which made Dionysos or Hades at once the ravisher of Persephone and her son by Zeus in serpent form—a myth which is summed up in the mystic phrase preserved by Clement of Alexandria that “The bull is the father of the serpent, and the serpent the father of the bull[140].”

Thus the Ophites accounted for the divinity who was in effect their Supreme God, the still higher Bythos, as we have seen, being put in the background as too awful for human consideration[141]. But it was still necessary to make manifest the feminine aspect of the deity which was always very prominent in Asia Minor. The Mother of the Gods, known as Ma in Lydia, Cybele in Phrygia proper, Artemis at Ephesus, the unnamed Syrian goddess at Hierapolis, and Aphrodite in Cyprus and elsewhere[142], was in the early Christian centuries the most prominent person in the Anatolian pantheon, a fact which Sir William Ramsay would attribute to the matriarchate, Mutterrecht, or custom of descent in the female line, which he thinks indigenous to Asia Minor. In the earliest Phrygian religion there seems little doubt that the supreme goddess was originally considered to be bisexual, and capable of production without male assistance, as is expressly stated in the legend of Agdistis or Cybele preserved by Pausanias[143], and perhaps hinted at in the stories of Amazons spread throughout the whole of Asia Minor. But it is probable that, as Sir William Ramsay himself says, this idea had become less prominent with the immigration from Europe of tribes of male warriors without female companions,[144] while Semitic influence was always against it. Hence the Ophites found themselves compelled to make their female deity inferior or posterior to their male. “Below these, again (i.e. below the First and Second Man or Father-and-Son),” says Irenaeus in reporting their doctrines, “is the Holy Spirit ... whom they call the First Woman[145].” Neither he nor Hippolytus gives us any direct evidence of the source whence this feminine Power was thought by them to have issued. But Hippolytus says without circumlocution that “this Man,” i.e. Adamas or the Father-and-Son, “is both male and female[146],” and he quotes the words of an Ophite hymn[147] addressed to him that: “From thee is Father and through thee is Mother, two names immortal, parents of Aeons, O thou citizen of heaven, Man of mighty name[148]!” Later, he puts in the mouth of the Naassene or Ophite writer from whom he repeatedly quotes, the phrase:

“The Spirit is where the Father and the Son are named, from whom and from the Father it is there born; and this (that is, the Spirit) is the many-named, myriad-eyed Incomprehensible One for whom every nature in different ways yearns,”

or in other words the soul or animating principle of Nature[149]. It therefore seems that the first Ophites made their Supreme God a triad like the Eleusinian, the Alexandrian, and the Anatolian, consisting of three persons two of whom were males and the third a female, or a Father, Mother, and Son, of whom the Son was but another and renewed form of the Father, while the union of all three was necessary to express every aspect of the Deity, who was nevertheless one in essence[150]. This threefold division of things, said the Ophites, ran through all nature “there being three worlds or universes: the angelic (that sent directly from God), the psychic, and the earthly or material; and three Churches: the Chosen, the Called, and the Captive[151].” The meaning of these names we shall see later when we consider the Ophite idea of the Apocatastasis[152] or return of the worlds to the Deity.

First, however, another Power had to be produced which should serve as an intermediary or ambassador from the Supreme Triad to the worlds below it. This necessity may have arisen from Plato’s view, adopted by Philo of Alexandria, that God was too high and pure to be contaminated by any contact with matter[153]. But it may also owe something to the idea common to all Orientals that a king or great man can only communicate with his inferiors through a wakil or agent; and that this idea was then current in Phrygia seems plain from the story in the Acts of the Apostles that in the Lycaonian province Barnabas, who was of majestic presence, was adored and nearly sacrificed to as Zeus, while Paul, who was the principal speaker, was only revered as Hermes[154]. The later Ophite account of the production of this intermediary power or messenger which we find in Irenaeus is that the Father-and-Son “delighting in the beauty of the Spirit”—that is of the First Woman—“shed their light upon her” and thus brought into existence “an incorruptible light, the third man, whom they call Christos[155].” With this last addition the Divine Family was considered complete, and the same author tells us that Christos and his mother were “immediately drawn up into the incorruptible aeon which they call the veritable Church[156].” This seems to be the first appearance in Gnosticism of the use of the word Church as signifying what was later called the Pleroma or Fulness of the Godhead; but it may be compared to the “Great Council” apparently used in the same sense by some unidentified prophet quoted by Origen, of which Great Council Christ was said by the prophet to be the “Angel” or messenger[157].

From this perfect Godhead, the Ophites had to show the evolution of a less perfect universe, a problem which they approached in a way differing but slightly from that of Simon Magus. This last, as we have seen, interposed between God and our own world three pairs of “Roots” or Powers together with an intermediate world of aeons whose angels and authorities had brought our universe into existence. These angels purposely fashioned it from existing matter, the substance most removed from and hostile to God, in order that they might rule over it and thus possess a dominion of their own. But the Ophites went behind this conception, and made the first confusion of the Divine light with matter the result of an accident. The light, in Irenaeus’ account of their doctrines, shed by the Father-and-Son upon the Holy Spirit was so abundant that she could not contain it all within herself, and some of it therefore, as it were, boiled over and fell down[158], when it was received by that matter which they, like Simon, looked upon as existing independently[159]. They described this last as separated into four elements, water, darkness, the abyss, and chaos, which we may suppose to be different strata of the same substance, the uppermost layer being apparently the waste of waters mentioned in Genesis. Falling upon these waters, the superfluity of light of the Holy Spirit stirred them, although before immovable, to their lowest depths, and took from them a body formed apparently from the envelope of waters surrounding it. Then, rising again by a supreme effort from this contact, it made out of this envelope the visible heaven which has ever since been stretched over the earth like a canopy[160]. This superfluity of light which thus mingled with matter, the earlier Ophites called, like the authors of the Wisdom-literature, Sophia, and also Prunicos (meaning apparently the “substitute”) and described as bisexual[161]. Another and perhaps a later modification of their doctrine fabled that it sprang from the left side of the First Woman while Christos emerged from her right. They therefore called it Sinistra and declared it to be feminine only[162]. Both traditions agreed that this Sophia or Prunicos put forth a son without male assistance, that this son in like manner gave birth to another power and so on, until at last seven powers at seven removes sprang from Sophia. Each of them fashioned from matter a habitation, and these are represented as heavens or hemispheres stretched out one under the other, every one becoming less perfect as it gets further from the Primordial Light[163]. Irenaeus and Hippolytus are agreed that the first or immediate son of Sophia was called Ialdabaoth, a name which Origen says, in speaking of the Ophites, is taken from the art of magic, and which surely enough appears in nearly all the earlier Magic Papyri[164]. Hippolytus says that this Ialdabaoth was the Demiurge and father of the visible universe or phenomenal world[165]. Irenaeus also gives the names of the later “heavens, virtues, powers, angels, and builders” as being respectively Iao, Sabaoth, Adonai, Eloaeus, Oreus, and Astaphaeus or Astanpheus, which agrees with the Ophite document or Diagram to be presently mentioned[166]. The first four of these names are too evidently the names given in the Old Testament to Yahweh for us to doubt the assertion of the Fathers that by Ialdabaoth the Ophites meant the God of the Jews[167]. The last two names, Oreus and Astaphaeus, Origen also asserts to be taken from the art of magic, and may be supposed to have some connection with fire and water respectively[168]. It is probable that the later Ophites identified all these seven heavens with the seven astrological “planets,” i.e. Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, the Sun, Venus, Mercury and the Moon in probably that order[169].

How now did the earth on which we live come into being? The primitive Babylonians, whose ideas and culture were at a very early date spread over the whole of Asia Minor, conceived the earth not as a globe but as a circular boat like the ancient coracle, over which the heavens stretched like a canopy or hemisphere[170]. Hence we must regard these heavens of the planetary powers, Ialdabaoth and his progeny, as a series of covers fitting one within the other like, in the words of the Fathers, “juggling cups,” or to take another simile, the successive skins of an onion. The earth stretched below these, but was at the stage of creation at which we have arrived really without form and void, being the formless waste of waters which covered the denser darkness and chaos. The ordered shape which it afterwards assumed and which we now see, was, in the Ophite story, the result of the fall of no deity, angel, or heavenly power, but of Man. Irenaeus’ account of this Second Fall is that the six powers descended from Ialdabaoth began to quarrel with their progenitor for supremacy—an idea which perhaps is to be referred either to the Jewish tradition of the revolt of the angels or with more likelihood to the astrological ideas about the benefic and malefic planets[171]. This so enraged him that he glared in his wrath upon the underlying dregs of matter, and his thought (ἔννοια) implanted there took birth and shape[172]. This fresh son of his was possessed of a quality of the possession of which he himself had never given any evidence, and was called Nous or Intelligence like the male of Simon’s first syzygy or pair of roots. But he was said to be of serpent form (ὀφιόμορφος) because, as says the Naassene or Ophite author quoted by Hippolytus, “the serpent is the personification of the watery element,” and therefore, perhaps, the symbol of that external ocean which the ancients thought surrounded the inhabited world[173]. It seems more probable, however, that the Ophites were compelled to introduce this form because the serpent was worshipped everywhere in Asia Minor as the type of the paternal aspect of the earth-goddess’ consort[174]. This is best shown, perhaps, in the Eleusinian legend of Zeus and Persephone; but Alexander himself was said to have been begotten by Zeus in the form of a serpent, and no Phrygian goddess seems ever to have been portrayed without one[175]. So much was this the case that in the Apocryphal Acta Philippi it is said that sacred serpents were kept in all the heathen temples in Asia. Hierapolis is, in the same document, called Ophioryma or the serpent’s stronghold, whence idolatry seems to be spoken of as the Echidna or Viper[176]. The connection of the serpent with the Sabazian rites has already been mentioned.

This Ophiomorphus, or god in serpent form, was in the later Ophite teaching the cause not only of man’s soul but of his passions. The Latin text of Irenaeus says that from him came “the spirit and the soul and all earthly things, whence all forgetfulness, and malice, and jealousy, and envy, and death came into being[177].” This was evidently written under the influence of the Christian idea that the serpent of Genesis was Satan or the Devil. But Hippolytus tells us, no doubt truly, that the Ophiomorphus of the earlier Ophites was in the opinion of his votaries a benevolent and beneficent power. After saying that they worship

“nothing else than Naas, whence they are called Naassenes, and that they say that to this Naas (or serpent) alone is dedicated every temple, and that he is to be found in every mystery and initiatory rite,” he continues, “They say that nothing of the things that are, whether deathless or mortal, with or without soul, could exist apart from him. And all things are set under him, and he is good and contains all things within himself, as in the horn of the unicorn, whence beauty and bloom are freely given to all things that exist according to their nature and relationship[178].”

It can hardly be doubted that the writer from whom Hippolytus here quotes is referring to the soul or animating principle of the world, whom he here and elsewhere identifies with the great God of the Greek mysteries[179]. Hence it was the casting-down to this earth of Ophiomorphus which gave it life and shape, and thus stamped upon it the impress of the First Man[180]. As Ophiomorphus was also the child of Ialdabaoth son of Sophia, the Soul of the World might therefore properly be said to be drawn from all the three visible worlds[181].

We come to the creation of man which the Ophites attributed to the act of Ialdabaoth and the other planetary powers, and represented as taking place not on the earth, but in some one or other of the heavens under their sway[182]. According to Irenaeus—here our only authority—Ialdabaoth boasted that he was God and Father, and that there was none above him[183]. His mother Sophia or Prunicos, disgusted at this, cried out that he lied, inasmuch as there was above him “the Father of all, the First Man and the Son of Man[184]”; and that Ialdabaoth was thereby led on the counsel of the serpent or Ophiomorphus to say, “Let us make man in our own image[185]!” Here the Greek or older text of Irenaeus ends, and our only remaining guide is the later Latin one, which bears many signs of having been added to from time to time by some person more zealous for orthodoxy than accuracy. Such as it is, however, it narrates at a length which compares very unfavourably with the brevity and concision of the statements of the Greek text, that Ialdabaoth’s six planetary powers on his command and at the instigation of Sophia formed an immense man who could only writhe along the ground until they carried him to Ialdabaoth who breathed into him the breath of life, thereby parting with some of the light that was in himself; that man “having thereby become possessed of intelligence (Nous) and desire (Enthymesis) abandoned his makers and gave thanks to the First Man”; that Ialdabaoth on this in order to deprive man of the light he had given him created Eve out of his own desire; that the other planetary powers fell in love with her beauty and begot from her sons who are called angels; and finally, that the serpent induced Adam and Eve to transgress Ialdabaoth’s command not to eat of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge[186]. On their doing so, he cast them out of Paradise, and threw them down to this world together with the serpent or Ophiomorphus. All this was done by the secret contrivance of Sophia, whose object throughout was to win back the light and return it to the highest world whence it had originally come. Her manner of doing so seems to have been somewhat roundabout, for it involved the further mingling of light with matter, and even included the taking away by her of light from Adam and Eve when turned out of Paradise and the restoring it to them when they appeared on this earth—a proceeding which gave them to understand that they had become clothed with material bodies in which their stay would be only temporary[187]. Cain’s murder of Abel was brought about by the same agency, as was the begettal of Seth, ancestor of the existing human race. We further learn that the serpent who was cast down got under him the angels begotten upon Eve by the planetary powers, and brought into existence six sons who, with himself, form “the seven earthly demons.” These are the adversaries of mankind, because it was on account of man that their father was cast down; and “this serpent is called Michael and Sammael[188].” Later Ialdabaoth sent the Flood, sought out Abraham, and gave the Law to the Jews. In this, as in everything, he was opposed by his mother Sophia, who saved Noah, made the Prophets prophesy of Christ, and even arranged that John the Baptist and Jesus should be born, the one from Elizabeth and the other from the Virgin Mary[189]. In all this, it is difficult not to see a later interpolation introduced for the purpose of incorporating with the teaching of the earlier Ophites the Biblical narrative, of which they were perhaps only fully informed through Apostolic teaching[190]. It is quite possible that this interpolation may be taken from the doctrine of the Sethians, which Irenaeus expressly couples in this chapter with that of the Ophites, and which, as given by Hippolytus, contains many Jewish but no Christian features[191]. Many of the stories in this interpolation seem to have found their way into the Talmud and the later Cabala, as well as into some of the Manichaean books.

So far, then, the Ophites succeeded in accounting to their satisfaction for the origin of all things, the nature of the Deity, the origin of the universe, and for that of man’s body. But they still had to account in detail for the existence of the soul or incorporeal part of man. Irenaeus, as we have seen, attributes it to Ophiomorphus, but although this may have been the belief of the Ophites of his time, the Naassenes assigned it a more complicated origin. They divided it, as Hippolytus tells us, into three parts which were nevertheless one, no doubt corresponding to the threefold division that we have before seen running through all nature into angelic, psychic, and earthly[192]. The angelic part is brought by Christos, who is, as we have seen, the angel or messenger of the triune Deity, into “the form of clay[193],” the psychic we may suppose to be fashioned with the body by the planetary powers, and the earthly is possibly thought to be the work of the earthly demons hostile to man[194]. Of these last two parts, however, we hear nothing directly, and their existence can only be gathered from the difference here strongly insisted upon between things “celestial earthly and infernal.” But the conveyance of the angelic soul to the body Hippolytus’ Ophite writer illustrates by a bold figure from what Homer in the Odyssey says concerning Hermes in his character of psychopomp or leader of souls[195]. As to the soul or animating principle of the world, Hippolytus tells us that the Ophites did not seek information concerning it and its nature from the Scriptures, where indeed they would have some difficulty in finding any, but from the mystic rites alike of the Greeks and the Barbarians[196]; and he takes us in turns through the mysteries of the Syrian worshippers of Adonis, of the Phrygians, the Egyptian (or rather Alexandrian) worshippers of Osiris, of the Cabiri of Samothrace, and finally those celebrated at Eleusis, pointing out many things which he considers as indicating the Ophites’ own peculiar doctrine on this point[197]. That he considers the god worshipped in all these different mysteries to be one and the same divinity seems plain from a hymn which he quotes as a song of “the great Mysteries,” and which the late Prof. Conington turned into English verse[198]. So far as any sense can be read into an explanation made doubly hard for us by our ignorance of what really took place in the rites the Ophite writer describes, or of any clear account of his own tenets, he seems to say that the many apparently obscene and sensual scenes that he alludes to, cover the doctrine that man’s soul is part of the universal soul diffused through Nature and eventually to be freed from all material contact and united to the Deity; whence it is only those who abstain from the practice of carnal generation who can hope to be admitted to the highest heaven[199]. All this is illustrated by many quotations not only from the heathen poets and philosophers, but also from the Pentateuch, the Psalms, the Jewish Prophets, and from the Canonical Gospels and St Paul’s Epistles.

The connection of such a system with orthodox Christianity seems at first sight remote enough, but it must be remembered that Hippolytus was not endeavouring to explain or record the Ophite beliefs as a historian would have done, but to hold them up to ridicule and, as he describes it, to “refute” them. Yet there can be no doubt that the Ophites were Christians or followers of Christ who accepted without question the Divine Mission of Jesus, and held that only through Him could they attain salvation. The difference between them and the orthodox in respect to this was that salvation was not, according to them, offered freely to all, but was on the contrary a magical result following automatically upon complete initiation and participation in the Mysteries[200]. Texts like “Strait is the way and narrow is the gate that leadeth into eternal life” and “Not every one that saith unto me Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of heaven” were laid hold of by them as showing that complete salvation was confined to a few highly instructed persons, who had had the sense to acquire the knowledge of the nature of the Deity and of the topography of the heavenly places which underlay the ceremonies of the Mysteries. Such an one, they said after his death would be born again not with a fleshly but with a spiritual body and passing through the gate of heaven would become a god[201]. It does not follow, however, that those who did not obtain this perfect gnosis would be left, as in some later creeds, to reprobation. The cry of “all things in heaven, on earth, and below the earth[202]” that the discord of this world[203] might be made to cease, which the Naassene author quoted by Hippolytus daringly connects with the name of Pappas given by the Phrygians to Sabazius or Dionysos, would one day be heard, and the Apocatastasis or return of the world to the Deity would then take place[204]. If we may judge from the later developments of the Ophite teaching this was to be when the last spiritual man (πνευματικός) or perfect Gnostic had been withdrawn from it. In the meantime those less gifted would after death pass through the planetary worlds of Ialdabaoth until they arrived at his heaven or sphere, and would then be sent down to the earth to be reincarnated in other bodies. Whether those who had attained some knowledge of the Divine nature without arriving at perfect Gnosis would or would not be rewarded with some sort of modified beatitude or opportunity of better instruction is not distinctly stated, but it is probable that the Ophites thought that they would[205]. For just as those who have been admitted into the Lesser Mysteries at Eleusis ought to pause and then be admitted into the “great and heavenly ones,” the progress of the Ophite towards the Deity must be progressive. They who participate in these heavenly mysteries, says the Naassene author, receive greater destinies than the others[206].

It might seem, therefore, that the Mysteries or secret rites of the heathens contained in themselves all that was necessary for redemption, and this was probably the Ophite view so far as the return of the universe to the bosom of the Deity and the consequent wiping out of the consequences of the unfortunate fall of Sophia or Prunicos were concerned. A tradition. preserved by Irenaeus says that Sophia herself “when she had received a desire for the light above her, laid down the body she had received from matter—which was, as we have seen, the visible heaven—-and was freed from it[207].” But this seems to be an addition which is not found in the Greek version, and is probably taken from some later developments of the Ophite creed. It is plain, however, that the whole scheme of nature as set forth in the opinions summarized above is represented as contrived for the winning-back of the light—for which we may, if we like, read life—from matter, and this is represented as the work of Sophia herself. The futile attempt of the arrogant and jealous Ialdabaoth to prolong his rule by the successive creation of world after world, of the archetypal or rather protoplasmic Adam, and finally of Eve, whereby the light is dispersed through matter more thoroughly but in ever-diminishing portions[208], is turned against him by his mother Sophia, the beneficent ruler of the planetary worlds, who even converts acquaintance with the “carnal generation” which he has invented into a necessary preparation for the higher mysteries[209]. Thus Hippolytus tells us that the Naassenes

“frequent the so-called mysteries of the Great Mother, thinking that through what is performed there, they see clearly the whole mystery. For they have no complete advantage from the things there performed except that they are not castrated. [Yet] they fully accomplish the work of the castrated [i.e. the Galli]. For they most strictly and carefully preach that one should abstain from all companying with woman, as do the castrated. And the rest of the work, as we have said at length, they perform like the castrated[210].”

So far, then, as the general scheme of the redemption of light from matter is concerned, there seems to have been no fundamental necessity in the Ophite view for the Mission of Jesus. But they assigned to Him a great and predominant part in hastening the execution of the scheme, and thus bringing about the near approach of the kingdom of heaven. We have seen that Sophia provided in spite of Ialdabaoth for the birth of the man Jesus from the Virgin Mary, and the Naassene author said that

“into this body of Jesus there withdrew and descended things intellectual, and psychic, and earthly: and these three Men (i.e. the First Man, the Son of Man, and Christos) speak together through Him each from his proper substance unto those who belong to each[211].”

The Latin text of Irenaeus amplifies the statement considerably and says that Prunicus, as it calls Sophia, finding no rest in heaven or earth, invoked the aid of her mother the First Woman. This power, having pity on her repentance, implored the First Man to send Christos to her assistance. This prayer was granted, and Christos descended from the Pleroma to his sister Sophia, announced his coming through John the Baptist, prepared the baptism of repentance, and beforehand fashioned Jesus, so that when Christos came down he might find a pure vessel, and that by Ialdabaoth her own son, the “woman” might be announced by Christ. The author quoted by Irenaeus goes on to say that Christ descended through each of the seven heavens or planetary worlds in the likeness of its inhabitants, and thus took away much of their power. For the sprinkling of light scattered among them rushed to him, and when he came down into this world he clothed his sister Sophia with it, and they exulted over each other, which they (the Ophites) “describe as the [meeting of] the bridegroom and the bride.” But “Jesus being begotten from the Virgin by the operation of God was wiser, purer, and juster than all men. Christos united to Sophia descended into Him [in His baptism] and so Jesus Christ was made[212].”

Jesus then began to heal the sick, to announce the unknown Father, and to reveal Himself as the Son of the first man. This angered the princes of the planetary worlds and their progenitor, Ialdabaoth, who contrived that He should be killed. As He was being led away for this purpose, Christos with Sophia left Him for the incorruptible aeon[213] or highest heaven. Jesus was crucified; but Christos did not forget Him and sent a certain power to Him, who raised Him in both a spiritual and psychic body, sending the worldly parts back into the world. After His Resurrection, Jesus remained upon earth eighteen months, and perception descending into Him taught what was clear. These things He imparted to a few of his disciples whom He knew to be capable of receiving such great mysteries, and He was then received into heaven. Christos sate down at the night hand of Ialdabaoth that he might, unknown to this last, take to himself the souls of those who have known these mysteries, after they have put off their worldly flesh. Thus Ialdabaoth cannot in future hold holy souls that he may send them down again into the age [i.e. this aeon]; but only those which are from his own substance, that is, which he has himself breathed into bodies. When all the sprinkling of light is thus collected, it will be taken up into the incorruptible aeon. The return to Deity will then be complete, and matter will probably be destroyed. In any case, it will have lost the light which alone gives it life[214].

What rites or form of worship were practised by these Ophites we do not know, although Epiphanius preserves a story that they were in the habit of keeping a tame serpent in a chest which at the moment of the consecration of their Eucharist was released and twined itself round the consecrated bread[215]. Probably the very credulous Bishop of Constantia was misled by some picture or amulet depicting a serpent with his tail in its mouth surrounding an orb or globe which represents the mundane egg of the Orphics. In this case the serpent most likely represented the external ocean which the ancients thought surrounded the habitable world like a girdle. But the story, though probably untrue, is some evidence that the later Ophites used, like all post-Christian Gnostics, to practise a ceremony resembling the Eucharist, and certainly administered also the rite of baptism which is alluded to above in the tale of the descent of Christos. Hippolytus also tells us that they used to sing many hymns to the First Man; and he gives us a “psalm” composed by them which, as he thinks, “comprehends all the mysteries of their error[216].” Unfortunately in the one text of the Philosophumena which we have, it is given in so corrupt a form that the first German editor declared it to be incapable of restoration. It may perhaps be translated thus:

The generic law of the Whole was the first Intelligence of all The second [creation?] was the poured-forth Chaos of the First-born And the third and labouring soul obtains the law as her portion Wherefore clothed in watery form [Behold] The loved one subject to toil [and] death Now, having lordship, she beholds the Light Then cast forth to piteous state, she weeps. Now she weeps and now rejoices Now she weeps and now is judged Now she is judged and now is dying Now no outlet is found, the unhappy one Into the labyrinth of woes has wandered. But Jesus said: Father, behold! A strife of woes upon earth From thy spirit has fallen But he [i.e. man?] seeks to fly the malignant chaos And knows not how to break it up. For his sake, send me, O Father; Having the seals, I will go down Through entire aeons I will pass, All mysteries I will open And the forms of the gods I will display, The secrets of the holy Way Called knowledge [Gnosis], I will hand down.

It is probable that this psalm really did once contain a summary of the essential parts of the Ophite teaching. In whatever way we may construe the first three lines, which were probably misunderstood by the scribe of the text before us, there can hardly be a doubt that they disclose a triad of three powers engaged in the work of salvation[217]. The fall of Sophia seems also to be alluded to in unmistakable terms, while the Mission of Jesus concludes the poem. Jesus, not here distinguished from the Christos or Heavenly Messenger of the Trinity, is described as sent to the earth for the purpose of bringing hither certain “mysteries” which will put man on the sacred path of Gnosis and thus bring about the redemption of his heavenly part from the bonds of matter. These “mysteries” were, as appears in Hippolytus and elsewhere, sacraments comprising baptism, unction, and a ceremony at least outwardly resembling the Christian Eucharist or Lord’s Supper[218]. These had the magical effect, already attributed by the Orphics to their own homophagous feast, of changing the recipient’s place in the scale of being and transforming him ipso facto into something higher than man. That the celebration of these mysteries was attended with the deepest secrecy accounts at once for their being nowhere described in detail by Hippolytus’ Ophite author, and also for the stories which were current among all the heresiological writers of filthy and obscene rites[219]. Fortified by these mysteries, and by the abstinences and the continence which they entailed—at all events theoretically, and as a counsel of perfection—the Ophite could attend, as we have seen, all the ceremonies of the still pagan Anatolians or of the Christian Church indifferently, conscious that he alone understood the inner meaning of either.

Another practice of the Ophites has accidentally come down to us which deserves some mention. The division of the universe into three parts, i.e. angelic, psychic, and earthly, which we have already seen in germ in the system of Simon Magus, was by the Ophites carried so much further than by him that it extended through the whole of nature, and seriously affected their scheme of redemption. Father Giraud, as we have seen, goes so far as to say that in the opinion of Naassenes, matter hardly existed, and that they thought that not only did Adamas, or the first man, enter into all things, but that in their opinion all things were contained within him[220]. This pantheistic doctrine may have been current in Phrygia and traces of it may perhaps be found in the Anatolian worship of nature; but the words of the Naassene psalm quoted above show that the Naassenes, like all the post-Christian Gnostics of whom we know anything, thought that matter not only had an independent existence, but was essentially malignant and opposed to God. They divided, as we have seen, the universe which came forth from Him into three parts of which the angelic, noëtic, or pneumatic included, apparently, nothing but the Pleroma or Fulness of the Godhead consisting of the Trinity of Father, Son and Mother with their messenger Christos. Then followed the second, psychic, or planetary world, containing the heaven of Sophia with beneath it the holy hebdomad or seven worlds of Ialdabaoth and his descendants[221]. Below this came, indeed, the choïc, earthly, or terrestrial world, containing some sparks of the light bestowed upon it consciously by Sophia and unconsciously by Ialdabaoth, and inhabited by mortal men. But this world was the worst example of the “discord” (ὰσυμφωνία), or as it was called later, the “confusion” (κέρασμος), caused by the mingling of light with matter, and as such was doomed to extinction and to eternal separation from the Divine.[222] In like manner, the soul of man consisted of three parts corresponding to the three worlds, that is to say, the pneumatic, psychic, and earthly; and of these three, the last was doomed to extinction. Only by laying aside his earthly part as Jesus had done and becoming entirely pneumatic, could man attain to the light and become united with the Godhead. But to do so, his soul must first pass from choïc to psychic and thence to pneumatic, or, as the Naassene author quoted by Hippolytus puts it, must be born again and must enter in at the gate of heaven[223].

This rebirth or passage of the soul from the choïc to the psychic, and thence to the pneumatic, was, as has been said, the work of the mysteries, especially of those new ones which the Ophite Jesus or Christos had brought to earth with Him from above. The process by which these “changes of the soul” were brought about was, according to the Naassenes, “set forth in the Gospel according to the Egyptians[224].” The only quotation pertinent to the matter which we have from this lost work is one preserved for us by Clement of Alexandria which refers to the coming of a heavenly age “when the two shall be made one, and the male with the female neither male nor female[225]”—a saying which seems to refer to the time when all the light now scattered among the lower worlds shall return to the androgyne Adamas from whom it once issued. But it is probable that this gospel only described the upward passage of the soul in figures and parables probably conveyed in texts of the Canonical Gospel divorced from their context and their natural meaning, as in the Naassene author quoted by Hippolytus. Such a gospel might be a sufficient means of instruction for the living, who could puzzle out its meaning with the help of their mystagogues or priests[226]; but it must always have been difficult for the best-instructed to remember the great complications of worlds, planets, and celestial powers that lay at the root of it. How difficult then must it have been thought for the disembodied soul to find its way through the celestial places, and to confront the “guardians of the gate” of each with proof of his exalted rank in the scale of being? What was wanted was some guide or clue that the dead could take with him like the Book of the Dead of the ancient Egyptians, some memory or survival of which had evidently come down to the Alexandrian worship[227], or like the gold plates which we have seen fulfilling the same office among the worshippers of the Orphic gods[228].

That the Ophites possessed such documents we have proof from the remarks of the Epicurean Celsus, who may have flourished in the reign of Hadrian (A.D. 117-138)[229]. In his attack on Christianity called The True Discourse, he charges the Christians generally with possessing a “diagram” in which the passage of the soul after death through the seven heavens is portrayed. Origen, in refuting this Epicurean’s arguments more than a century later, denies that the Church knew anything of such a diagram, and transfers the responsibility for it to what he calls “a very insignificant sect called Ophites[230].” He further says that he has himself seen this diagram and he gives a detailed description of it sufficient to enable certain modern writers to hazard a guess as to what it must have looked like[231]. It seems to have been chiefly composed of circles, those in the uppermost part—which Celsus says were those “above the heavens”—being two sets of pairs. Each pair consisted of two concentric circles, one pair being inscribed, according to Origen, Father-and-Son, and according to Celsus, “a greater and a less” which Origen declares means the same thing[232]. By the side of this was the other pair, the outer circle here being coloured yellow and the inner blue; while between the two pairs was a barrier drawn in the form of a double-bladed axe[233].

“Above this last” Origen says “was a smaller circle inscribed ‘Love,’ and below it another touching it with the word ‘Life.’ And on the second circle, which was intertwined with and included two other circles, another figure like a rhomboid ‘The Forethought of Sophia.’ And within their (?) point of common section was ‘the Nature of Sophia.’ And above their point of common section was a circle, on which was inscribed ‘Knowledge,’ and lower down another on which was the inscription ‘Comprehension[234].’”

There is also reference made by Origen to “The Gates of Paradise,” and a flaming sword depicted as the diameter of a flaming circle and guarding the tree of knowledge and of life; but nothing is said of their respective places in the diagram.

Jacques Matter, whose Histoire Critique du Gnosticisme appeared in 1843, without its author having the benefit of becoming acquainted with Hippolytus’ Philosophumena, which tells us so much as to the doctrines of the Naassenes or early Ophites, and Father Giraud, who has on the contrary drawn largely from it, and whose dissertation on the Ophites was published in 1884, have both given pictorial representations of the Ophite diagram. Although they differ somewhat in the arrangement of the circles, both are agreed that the blue and yellow circles signify the Holy Spirit and Christos. The Pleroma or Fulness of the Godhead consisting of Father, Son and Holy Spirit, with the Christos their messenger, therefore seems figured in these two pairs of circles. Both Matter and Father Giraud also arrange four other circles labelled respectively Knowledge, Nature, Wisdom, and Comprehension (Γνῶσις, Φύσις, Σοφία, and Σύνεσις) within one large one with a border of intertwined lines which they call the Forethought of Sophia (Πρόνοια Σοφίας). This may be the correct rendering, but it is hardly warranted by Origen’s words given above, nor do we know of any powers, aeons, or other entities in the Ophite system called Gnosis or Physis[235]. In any event, however, it is fairly clear that this part of the diagram represents the Sophia who fell from the Holy Spirit into matter, and that her natural or first place should be the heaven stretched out above the seven planetary worlds. Yet Irenaeus tells us that the Ophites he describes thought that Sophia succeeded finally in struggling free from the body of matter and that the super-planetary firmament represented merely the lifeless shell she had abandoned[236]. This is, perhaps, the view taken by the framers of the diagram.

However that may be, Origen’s discourse agrees with Celsus in describing a “thick black line marked Gehenna or Tartarus” which cuts, as he says, the diagram in two. This is specially described by Celsus; and if it surprises anyone to find it thus placed above the planetary heavens, it can only be said that later Gnostics, including those who are responsible for the principal documents of the Pistis Sophia to be presently mentioned, put one of the places where souls were tortured in “the Middle Way” which seems above, and not, like the classical Tartarus, below the earth[237]. Below this again, come the seven spheres of the planets dignified by the names of Horaios, Ailoaios, Astaphaios, Sabaoth, Iao, Ialdabaoth and Adonai respectively. These names are, indeed, those given in Irenaeus as the names of the descendants of Sophia, although the order there given is different. As to the meaning of them, Origen declares that Ialdabaoth, Horaios, and Astaphaios are taken from magic and that the others are (the Hebrew) names of God[238]. But it should be noticed that Origen is in this place silent as to their situation in the diagram, and that those assigned to them in Matter’s and Father Giraud’s reconstructions are taken from the prayers or “defences” which will be given independently of it.

The division which Matter calls “Atmosphère terrestre” and Father Giraud “The Fence of Wickedness” (Φραγμὸς Κακίας) is also not to be found in Origen’s description of the diagram, but is taken from another passage where he defines it as the gates leading to the aeon of the archons[239]. The remaining sphere, containing within itself ten circles in Matter’s reconstruction and seven in Father Giraud’s, is however fully described. The number ten is, as Matter himself admitted to be probable, a mistake of the copyist for seven[240], and there can be no doubt that the larger sphere is supposed to represent our world. The word “Leviathan” which in accordance with Origen’s description is written both at the circumference and at the centre of the circle[241] is evidently Ophiomorphus or the serpent-formed son of Ialdabaoth whom we have seen cast down to earth by his father together with the protoplasts Adam and Eve[242]. He should according to the later Gnostics be represented in the shape of a “dragon” or serpent coiled round the world and having his tail in his mouth, while the seven circles within the ring thus formed are the seven Archons or ruling spirits created by him in imitation of Ialdabaoth. These are represented in beast-like form and are, as we have seen, hostile to man. The first four have the Hebrew angelic names of Michael, Suriel, Raphael, and Gabriel, perhaps because the four planetary worlds to which they correspond bear also Hebrew names of God[243]. The remaining three Thauthabaoth, Erataoth, and Thartharaoth are probably taken from the peculiar corruption of Hebrew and Egyptian words to be found in the Magic Papyri. Some of them, at any rate, we meet again later. The word Behemoth which appears at the foot of the diagram may be translated “animals[244].” It may either be a further description of the seven Archons—as seems most likely—or be taken in its etymological sense as the animal kingdom which in the scale of being succeeds terrestrial man.

To this diagram, Origen adds the prayers or defences above alluded to, which he draws from some source not mentioned. He calls them the “instruction” which they (i.e. the Ophites) receive after passing through the “fence of wickedness,—gates which are subjected to the world of the Archons[245]”; but we know from other sources that they are the speeches, “defences” or passwords required to be uttered by the soul of the initiated when, released from this world by death, she flies upwards through the planetary spheres[246]. As they contain many instructive allusions, they can best be given in Origen’s own words, at the same time remarking that the reading is not in all cases very well settled. The first power through whose realm the soul had to pass is not here mentioned by name, but by the process of exhaustion is plainly the one whom Irenaeus calls Adonaeus or Adonai.

To him the soul of the dead is to say:

“I salute the one-formed king, the bond of blindness, thoughtless oblivion, the first power preserved by the spirit of Pronoia and by Sophia; whence I am sent forth pure, being already part of the light of the Son and of the Father. Let grace be with me, O Father, yea let it be with me[247]!”

In passing through the next mentioned, which is the realm of Ialdabaoth:

“Thou O First and Seventh, born to command with boldness, Ialdabaoth the Ruler (Archon) who hast the word of pure Mind (νοῦς), a perfect work to the Son and the Father, I bring the symbol of life in the impress of a type, and open the door to the world which in thy aeon thou didst close, and pass again free through thy realm. Let grace be with me, O Father, yea let it be with me[248]!”

Arrived at Iao, he ought to say:

“Thou, O Second Iao and first lord of death, who dost rule over the hidden mysteries of the Son and the Father, who dost shine by night, part of the guiltless one. I bear my own beard as a symbol and am ready to pass through thy rule, having been strengthened by that which was born from thee by the living word. Let grace be with me, O Father, yea let it be with me[249]!”

To Sabaoth:

“Ruler of the Fifth realm, King Sabaoth, advocate of the law of thy creation. I am freed by grace of a mightier Pentad. Admit me, when thou beholdest the blameless symbol of thy art preserved by the likeness of a type, a body set free by a pentad. Let grace be with me, O Father, yea let it be with me[250]!”

To Astaphaios:

“Ὁ Astaphaios, Ruler of the third gate, overseer of the first principle of water, behold me an initiate, admit me who have been purified by the spirit of a virgin, thou who seest the substance of the Cosmos. Let grace be with me, O Father, yea let it be with me[251]!”

To Ailoaios:

“O Ailoaios, ruler of the second gate, admit me who brings to thee the symbol of thy mother, a grace hidden from the powers of the authorities. Let grace be with me, O Father, yea let it be with me[252]!”

and to Horaios:

“O Horaios, who didst fearlessly overleap the fence of fire receiving the rulership of the first gate, admit me when thou beholdest the symbol of thy power, engraved on the type of the Tree of Life, and formed by resemblance in the likeness of the Guiltless One. Let grace be with me, O Father, yea let it be with me[253]!”

These defences have evidently got out of their proper order, and have probably been a good deal corrupted as well[254]. But their form and general purport are mostly intelligible and show undoubted signs of Egyptian origin. They were therefore probably not the work of the earlier Ophites or Naassenes, but were most likely introduced when the Ophite doctrines began to leave their primitive seat in Phrygia and to spread westward into North Africa and the south-east of Europe. The diagram itself seems to be fairly expressive of the more ancient teaching and in particular the division of all things below the Godhead into three parts. Thus we find in it the “middle space” or heaven of Sophia, itself perhaps the Paradise whence the protoplasts and Ophiomorphus were hurled, then the world of seven planets, and finally this earth under the government of Ophiomorphus’ seven angels. To judge from Origen’s remark that “they say there is a sympathy (συμπάθεια) between the Star Phaenon (i.e. Saturn) and the lion-like power (Michael)[255],” it is probable that the Ophites, like the Babylonian astrologers, looked upon the system of “correspondences,” as it was afterwards called, as running through all nature in such a way that every world and every power inhabiting it was a reflection of the one above it[256]. That each world according to the Naassenes contained a “Church” or assembly of souls[257] is stated in the text quoted above, the “Captive” Church there mentioned being evidently composed of the souls still held in the grip of matter, the “Called” of those who had passed into the planetary worlds, and the “Chosen” of those who were purified enough to be admitted into the middle space or Paradise of Sophia[258]. That these last were thought to be eventually united with the Deity appears in some later developments of the Ophite faith, but the doctrine seems also to have been known to the Naassenes, since the author quoted by Hippolytus speaks of “the perfect gnostics” becoming “kingless” (that is, subject to no other being) and as appointed to “share in the Pleroma[259].”

Of the amount of success which the speculations of the Ophites enjoyed we know very little. Origen, as we have seen, speaks of them as being in his day “an insignificant sect”; and we have no proof that their numbers were ever very large[260]. Father Giraud asserts on the faith of some of the smaller heresiologists and Conciliar Acts that they spread over the whole of Asia Minor, through Syria and Palestine into Egypt on the one hand, and, on the other, to Mesopotamia, Armenia, and even to India, and this is probably more or less correct[261]. But those who had actually read their writings, as Irenaeus and Hippolytus evidently had done, seem to have looked upon them more as the source of many later heresies than as formidable by their own numbers. Whether the Sethians with whom Irenaeus would identify them were really a subdivision of the Ophite sect may be doubted, because in Hippolytus’ account of the Sethian doctrines, the existence of Jesus is never mentioned or referred to, and there is some reason for thinking them a non-Christian sect[262]. But the heresies of the Peratae and of Justinus, which Hippolytus describes as not differing much from the Ophites, certainly resemble that which has been summarized above too closely for the resemblance to be accidental; while the same remark applies to those of the Barbeliotae and Cainites described by Irenaeus, and to the Gnostics, Archontics, and others of whom we read in Epiphanius’ Panarion. Most of these sects seem to have flourished on the Eastern or Asiatic outskirts of the Roman Empire, although some of them probably had settlements also in Egypt, Greece, Crete, and Cyrene. As the first Ophites had contrived to make an amalgam of the fervent and hysterical worship of nature in Anatolia with the Jewish and Christian tenets, so no doubt these daughter sects contrived to fit in with them the legends of the local cults among which they found themselves. But such compromises were not likely to last long when the Catholic Church began to define and enforce the orthodox faith, and the Ophites seem to have been one of the first to succumb. In the Vth century A.D., there were still Ophite “colleges” to be found in the province of Bithynia; for Theocritus and Evander, the bishops of Chalcedon and Nicomedia, “refuted” their leaders publicly with such effect, says Praedestinatus, that they afterwards broke into their “secret places” at the head of a furious mob, drove away their priests, killed the sacred serpents, and “delivered the people from that danger[263].” This is the last that we hear of them as an organized sect, and although Justinian in A.D. 530 thought right to include them by name in his law against heretics, it is probable that by then their opinions had long since passed into other forms[264].

Probably one of the first changes to take place in the Ophite faith was the withdrawal into the background of the serpent worship which respect for the ancient cults of Asia Minor had imposed upon the earlier members of the sect. In the diagram, Ophiomorphus does not seem to have been depicted in his proper shape, although he may perhaps be identified with the Leviathan there shown as surrounding the terrestrial world. Those Ophites who wished to obtain proselytes among Christian catechumens no doubt felt the advisability of not insisting upon this conception, inasmuch as “the serpent” was the figure under which the Oriental Christians loved to allude to the Pagan worships which still opposed them in Asia Minor[265]. Hence there arose much confusion among the Ophites themselves as to the character of the serpent, and while some, according to Irenaeus, asserted that Sophia the mother of Ialdabaoth herself became the serpent[266], Theodoret, a very late witness, thinks that the Ophites of his time held that Ophiomorphus, although originally the minister of Sophia, had gone over to the other side, and had become the enemy of mankind[267]. In this we may also, perhaps, see, if we will, the effect of Egyptian influence upon the earlier Ophite teaching; for in Egypt, the serpent Apep was always looked upon as the enemy of Râ, the Sun-god, who was rightly considered the great benefactor of humanity. It is no doubt due to the same influence that in one of the documents of the Pistis Sophia—one part of which, as will be seen later, was probably written for the furtherance of a late form of the Ophite heresy—the serpent, while keeping his place in the Cosmos as the great ocean which surrounds the earth, is transformed into the outer darkness of the Canonical Gospels, and described as a huge torture-chamber for the punishment of souls[268]. The same document shows us how the Ophites, while adopting all the ideas of their predecessors the Orphics as to the respective states of the initiated and uninitiated after death,—including therein their reincarnation, the draught from the lake of memory and the like—contrived to mix with them the current astrological ideas of the time which made all these events happen in an order determined by the motions of the stars[269]. This tendency, already visible in Hippolytus’ time in the Ophite sect which he calls the Peratae[270], will, however, be better considered when we come to deal with the documents of the Pistis Sophia themselves.

There remains to be said that the Gospel according to the Egyptians mentioned above is the only apocryphal document that Hippolytus directly attributes to the earlier Ophites or Naassenes. The sects derived from them seem to have made use of a great number of others, among which we find a Book of Baruch otherwise unknown to us, The Paraphrase of Seth, the Gospels of Nicodemus, Philip, and Thomas, together with a Gospel according to the Hebrews, which may or may not have been identical with the one which Hippolytus calls that according to the Egyptians[271]. Of these, the first two are entirely lost, and the documents which we possess bearing the name of the Gospel of Nicodemus relate the events of the Crucifixion in much the same way as the Canonical Gospels, but add thereto the visit of Jesus to Hades. A Gospel of Thomas, which is also extant, contains only the account of miracles performed by Jesus in His infancy, and therefore goes to controvert the Ophite theory that Christos and Sophia only descended upon Him at His baptism, and that up to that period He was as other men. It is probable, however, that our copies of these Apocryphal Gospels have been severely edited so as to expunge everything which savoured of Gnostic teaching and may really have been partly or wholly the work of Ophites[272]. Of the Gospel of Philip, Epiphanius has preserved a short passage as follows:

“The Lord has revealed to me what the soul ought to say when she goes to heaven, and how she ought to answer each of the Powers on high. ‘I have known myself,’ she says, ‘and I have collected myself from everywhere, and I have not begotten children for the Archon, but I have rooted out his roots, and I have collected the scattered members, and I know thee what thou art. For I, she says, am from above[273].’ And thus he [i.e. Philip] says, she is set free. But if, he says, she is found to have begotten a son, she is retained below, until she can receive again her own children, and draw them up to herself[274].”

Similar expressions are to be found in two of the documents of the Pistis Sophia, and the abstinence from sexual intercourse which they enjoin is direct and first-hand evidence rebutting the accusation of promiscuous immorality which Epiphanius brings against the Ophites or their related sects. Epiphanius attributes to the same sect of “Gnostici” the use of a Gospel of Perfection which “others”—the context shows that he means certain Ophites—“are not ashamed to call the Gospel of Eve.” Of this he also preserves a single passage as follows:

“I stood upon a high mountain, and I saw a huge man and another who was mutilated [or perhaps only smaller, κολοβὸν] and I heard a voice of thunder, and I drew near to hearken and he spoke to me and said, ‘I am thou and thou art I; and where thou art, there am I, and I am scattered through all things. And whencesoever thou dost wish, collect me, and in collecting me, thou dost collect thyself[275].’”

Is the greater and lesser man here the Adamas or Father-and-Son of the Ophites, in which case the latter part of the passage doubtless refers to the scattering of the light through the world of matter and the necessity of its collection and return to the Godhead. The “I am thou and thou art I” phrase is repeated in the Pistis Sophia by the risen Jesus to His disciples[276], and seems to refer to the final union of the perfected human soul with the Deity.

In addition to these books, the Ophites whom Irenaeus and Hippolytus describe quoted freely from the Canonical books of the Old Testament, from one of the apocryphal books of Ezra and from the Book of Tobit, as also from such books of the Canonical New Testament as the Gospels, including that of St John, and most of the Pauline Epistles, including that to the Hebrews[277]. But it would be going too far to say that they “accepted” these or attributed to them a Divine origin, or thought them inspired in the sense in which the word was used by the Catholic Church. On the contrary, Epiphanius complains that they thought many of the contents of the Old Testament Books at any rate were inspired only by Ialdabaoth and the creators of the world of matter for the purpose of misleading mankind[278]; and throughout they seem to have considered all the Canonical Scriptures that they quote as on an equality with the writings of Homer, Hesiod, the legendary Orpheus, and other heathen writers such as Herodotus. Without attempting to deny or question the historical truth of the facts or legends recorded by all these authors, they regarded them merely as figures having an allegorical or typical meaning, which they could interpret in any manner they pleased, so as to make them accord with their own preconceived theories. Thus the Naassenes when they found St Luke quoting from the Proverbs of Solomon that “the just will fall seven times and rise again,” declared that this referred to the downward passage of man’s soul through the planetary heavens[279]; and Justinus, one of the Ophite teachers, finding a story in Herodotus about Heracles and the serpent-tailed girl whom he met in Scythia, said that it was a type of the generation of the universe by the combination of the invisible and unforeseeing Demiurge and the female principle or Sophia[280]. The same dialectic had already been made use of by the Orphics, by Philo of Alexandria, and by Simon Magus; but the Ophites seem to have been the first to apply it to all literature. The full effect of this method of interpretation we shall see later.

Generally speaking, it may be said that the Ophites seem to have been the first to bring about any kind of amalgamation between the popular religions of the Near East and the rising faith of Christianity. By interpreting the “mysteries” or secret rites of Asia Minor and elsewhere in their own sense, they supplied Christianity with a mythology which it would otherwise have lacked and the absence of which must always have proved a bar to its propagation among other than Semitic peoples. At the same time they greatly exalted the figure of Christ, who in their system became much less the personal teacher and master of the Jewish-Christian communities[281] than the angel or messenger of the Supreme Being sent from above in pursuance of a vast scheme for the redemption of the human race. In this capacity it went some way towards identifying the historical Jesus with the great god of the Mysteries and towards giving the sacraments of the newly-founded Church the secular authority of the rites practised in them. The influence of the Ophite system or systems upon the sects which succeeded them is at present hard to define, but there can be little doubt that some of the documents, which have come down to us in the Coptic MSS. before mentioned and will be more fully described in Chapter X, can only be explained by reference to them.

Footnote 79:

“Eorum qui ante adventum Christi Haereseos arguuntur.” Philastrius, Ep. Brixiensis, de Haeresibus Liber, c. I. vol. I. p. 5, Oehler.

Footnote 80:

Augustinus, de Haeresibus (cf. ad Quod vult deum) Liber, c. XVII. I. p. 200, Oehler.

Footnote 81:

Pseudo-Tertullianus, Adversus omnes Haereses, cc. V., VI. p. 273, Oehler. The writer was probably Victorinus of Pettau.

Footnote 82:

Pseudo-Hieronymus, Indiculus de Haeresibus, c. III., vol. I. p. 285, Oehler.

Footnote 83:

Acts vi. 5. It will be noted that Epiphanius, who himself belonged to the sect in his youth, interposes only the Basilidians between them and the followers of Saturninus, the “heresy” of which last he derives directly from that of Simon Magus.

Footnote 84:

Rev. ii. 6, 15.

Footnote 85:

Origen, cont. Celsum, Bk VI. c. 28. Possibly the Euphrates called “the Peratic” or Mede by Hippolytus (op. cit. Bk IV. c. 2, p. 54, Cruice).

Footnote 86:

Hippolytus, op. cit. Bk V. c. 7, p. 141, Cruice. This Mariamne is doubtless the sister of Philip mentioned in the Apocryphal Acta Philippi (c. XXXII., Tischendorf), which have, as is said later, a strong Gnostic or Manichaean tinge. Celsus knew a sect which took its name from her. See Origen, cont. Cels. Bk V. c. 62.

Footnote 87:

The Canonical Apocalypse is not earlier than 70 A.D., and was probably written soon after the fall of the Temple of Jerusalem. Hippolytus and Origen wrote 130 years later.

Footnote 88:

Naassene is evidently derived from the Hebrew or Aramaean נחש “Serpent,” cf. Hipp. op. cit. Bk V. c. 6, p. 139, Cruice, and exactly corresponds to the Greek ὀφίτης and the Latin serpentinus (Low Latin serpentarius). “Worshipper of the Serpent” seems to be the patristic gloss on the meaning of the word.

Footnote 89:

Giraud, Ophitae, c. 4, § 65, p. 89. The question really depends upon Hippolytus’ sources, as to which see last chapter, pp. 11, 12. Cf. De Faye, Introduction, etc., p. 41. Hippolytus’ Naassene author cannot be much earlier than 170 A.D. since he quotes from St John’s Gospel, and probably later than the work of Irenaeus written in 180-185. Yet the Ophite system described by Irenaeus is evidently not a primitive one and has been added to by his Latin translator. See n. 3, p. 47, infra.

Footnote 90:

Irenaeus, Bk I. c. 27, § 1, p. 226, Harvey, says that the Ophites are the same as the Sethians; Hippolytus, op. cit. Bk V. c. 11, p. 184, Cruice, that they are connected with the Peratae, the Sethians, and the system of Justinus. Epiphanius, Haer. XXXVII. c. 1, p. 494, Oehler, while deriving them from Nicolaus the Deacon, gives them a common origin with those whom he calls Gnostics simply, and identifies these last with the Borboriani, Coddiani, Stratiotici, Phibionitae, Zacchaei, and Barbelitae (see Haer. XXVI. c. 3).

Footnote 91:

Hippolytus, op. cit. Bk V. c. 11, p. 184, Cruice.

Footnote 92:

ἑαυτοὺς γνωστικοὺς ὀνομάζοντες. Hippolytus, loc. cit. Eusebius, H. E. Bk IV. c. 7, says that Carpocrates was the father of the heresy of the Gnostics and contemporary with Basilides.

Footnote 93:

Epiphanius, Haer. XXVI. c. 7, pp. 174, 176, Oehler.

Footnote 94:

Tertullian, de Praescript. Haer. c. XLII.

Footnote 95:

Josephus, Antiq. Bk XII. c. 3.

Footnote 96:

Ramsay, Cities and Bishoprics of Phrygia, II. pp. 667 sqq.; St Paul, pp. 142 sqq.; Commentary on Galatians, pp. 189 sqq. The fact that Timothy, the son of the Jewess Eunice by a Greek father, was not circumcised (see Acts xvi. 1) is quoted in support.

Footnote 97:

E.g. the Montanist, the most formidable of the heresies which attacked the primitive Church, apart from Gnosticism. Cf. also Galatians i. 6.

Footnote 98:

Mahaffy, Greek World under Roman Sway, p. 168. For the tyranny of the Armenians, see Plutarch, Lucullus, cc. XIV., XXI.

Footnote 99:

Mahaffy, Gk. World, p. 100.

Footnote 100:

Mahaffy, ibid. p. 225.

Footnote 101:

Ramsay, Cities, etc., I. p. 9.

Footnote 102:

Ramsay, Cities, etc., I. p. 87.

Footnote 103:

Ramsay, ibid. I. p. 92.

Footnote 104:

Ramsay, ibid. I. pp. 93, 94. The Galli or priests of Cybele, who mutilated themselves in religious ecstasy, seem to have been the feature of Anatolian religion which most struck the Romans, when the statue of the Mother of the Gods first appeared among them. Cf. next page. For the other side of the religion, see Lucian, de Dea Syria, cc. VI., XLIII., and Apuleius, Metamorph. Bk VIII. c. 29.

Footnote 105:

As in the hymn to Attis said to have been sung in the Great Mysteries, given in the Philosophumena (see p. 54, infra). Cf. Ramsay, Cities, etc., I. pp. 132, 263, 264, for other identifications. The Anatolian name of the Dea Syria to whose cult Nero was addicted, was Atargatis, which Prof. Garstang would derive from the Babylonian Ishtar (Strong, Syrian Goddess, 1913, p. vii); see Cumont, Les Religions Orientales dans le Paganisme Romain, Paris, 1906, p. 126. The whole of Cumont’s chapters on Syria and Asia Minor (op. cit. pp. 57-89) can be consulted with advantage. The American edition, 1911, contains some additional notes. See, too, Decharme’s article on Cybele in Daremberg and Saglio’s Dict. des Antiq.

Footnote 106:

Dill, Nero to Marcus Aurelius, pp. 548 sqq.

Footnote 107:

See n. 1, supra; Suetonius, Nero, c. LVI.

Footnote 108:

Dill, loc. cit., and authorities there quoted.

Footnote 109:

Cumont, Rel. Or. p. 77, and see index to American edition, 1911.

Footnote 110:

Ezekiel viii. 14.

Footnote 111:

Jeremiah vii. 18; lxiv. 17-19.

Footnote 112:

Ramsay, Cities, etc., II. p. 674, quoting Neubauer, Géographie du Talmud.

Footnote 113:

Cicero, pro Flacc. c. XXVIII. The Jews of the Dispersion in Egypt had temples of their own, in one at least of which Yahweh had for assessors a goddess Anat and a subordinate god Bethel. See René Dussaud, “Les Papyrus judéo-araméens d’Elephantiné,” R.H.R. t. LXIV. (1911) p. 350.

Footnote 114:

Acts xvi. 2, 3. See n. 3, p. 28, supra.

Footnote 115:

Layard, Nineveh and Babylon, 1853, pp. 509 sqq. Was this why Daniel was called “Master of the Magicians”? Dan. iv. 9; v. 11.

Footnote 116:

Thus, in a Coptic spell, the Words from the Cross: “Eli, eli, lama sabachthani,” are described as “the revered names of God.” See Rossi, “Trattato gnostico” in Mem. della Real. Accad. di Torino, Ser. B, XLII. fol. 9. So in mediaeval magic the word “Eieazareie” or “Escherie” is frequently used, apparently without any suspicion that it covers the אהיה אשר אהיה ’Ehyeh ’asher ’ehyeh—“I am that I am” of Exodus.

Footnote 117:

Hausrath, Hist. of New Testament Times, Eng. ed. 1878, I. pp. 126, 127, and authorities there quoted.

Footnote 118:

See last note. In the Acts, Bar-jesus or Elymas the sorcerer, the seven sons of Sceva, and some of those who burned their magical books at Ephesus, are said to be Jews. Harnack, Expansion of Christianity, Eng. ed. I. pp. 156, 157, says the Jews were known as exorcisers of demons throughout the Roman Empire.

Footnote 119:

Origen, cont. Cels. Bk IV. c. 33. Cf. ibid. c. 34, and Bk I. c. 22. Also Justin Martyr’s Dial. c. Tryph. c. LXXXV.

Footnote 120:

See Chapter III, vol. I. n. 6, p. 106, supra.

Footnote 121:

Karl Wessely, in Expositor, Series III, vol. IV. (1886), pp. 194 sqq., gives many specimens of these spells. The papyri from which they are taken are printed in full in his Griechische Zauberpapyrus von Paris und London, Wien, 1888, and his Neue Griechische Zauberpapyri, Wien, 1893. See also Parthey, Zwei griechische Zauberpapyri des Berliner Museums, Berlin, 1866; Leemans, Papyri Graeci Mus. Ant. Publ. Lugduni Batavi, t. II., Leyden, 1885, and Kenyon, Gk. Papyri in B.M. before quoted.

Footnote 122:

They sometimes speak of certain expressions being used by the ἀρχιερεῖς “high priests,” Leemans, op. cit. t. II. p. 29. Does this mean the adepts in magic or the heads of a sect?

Footnote 123:

Origen, cont. Cels. Bk. I. c. 24.

Footnote 124:

So Kuenen, Religion of Israel (Eng. ed.), III. p. 314, says that the existence of the Cabala is indicated in the Talmud.

Footnote 125:

See Chapter V, vol. I. pp. 169, 170, supra.

Footnote 126:

The Sumerian moon-god, Nannar, was denoted by the number 30, Marduk called 50 and so on. See King, Seven Tablets of Creation, 1902, I. p. 66.

Footnote 127:

See Chapter VII, supra.

Footnote 128:

Isidore Loeb, La Grande Encyclopédie, s.v. La Cabbale juive; ibid. F. Herman Krüger, s.v. Gnosticisme, and Franck, La Kabbale, Paris, 1843, p. 203, both notice the likeness between Gnosticism and the Cabala and say that they are derived from the same source.

Footnote 129:

See the Sumerian Hymn of Creation translated by Sayce, _Religions of Ancient Egypt and Babylonia_ (Gifford Lectures), Edinburgh, 1902, p. 380; Jastrow, Religion of Babylonia and Assyria, Boston, U.S.A. 1898, p. 490; King, Seven Tablets, p. 3; Rogers, Rel. of Bab., p. 108.

Footnote 130:

“Au commencement était le Nun, l’océan primordial, dans les profondeurs infinies duquel flottaient les germes des choses. De toute éternité Dieu s’engendra et s’enfanta lui-même au sein de cette masse liquide sans forme encore et sans usage.” Maspero, Hist. Ancienne des Peuples de l’Orient, p. 326.

Footnote 131:

Diogenes Laertius, Vit. Philosoph. Bk I. c. 6.

Footnote 132:

Including in that name some who attained to high office in the Catholic Church. Thus Hatch, H. L. p. 255, says with apparent truth that Clement of Alexandria “anticipated Plotinus in conceiving of God as being ‘beyond the One and higher than the Monad itself,’ which was the highest abstraction of current philosophy.” The passage he here relies on is in Clement’s Paedagogus, Bk I. c. 8. Hatch goes on to say, “There is no name that can properly be named of Him: ‘Neither the One nor the Good, nor Mind, nor Absolute Being, nor Father, nor Creator, nor Lord’”—expressions to be found in Clement’s Stromata, Bk V. c. 12. Clement’s orthodoxy may be called in question; but no fault has been found in that respect with Synesius, Bishop of Ptolemais and the friend of Hypatia. Yet in his Hymns he uses expressions which would have come naturally to the lips of any Ophite. Thus:

Σὺ δ’ ἄρρην, σὺ δὲ θῆλυς, Σὺ δὲ φωνά, σὺ δὲ σιγά, Φύσεως φύσις γονῶσα, Σὺ δ’ ἄναξ, αἰῶνος αἰών, Τὸ μέν, ᾗ θέμις βοᾶσαι;

“Male thou and female, Voice thou and silence, Nature engendered of Nature, Thou King, Aeon of Aeons, What is it lawful to call thee?”

and again

Πατέρων πάντων Πάτερ, αὐτοπάτωρ, Προπάτωρ, ἀπάτωρ, Υἱὲ σεαυτοῦ.... Μύστας δὲ νόος Τά τε καὶ τὰ λέγει, Βυθὸν ἄρρητον Ἀμφιχορεύων.

“Father of all Fathers, Father of thyself, Propator [Forefather] who hast no father, O Son of thyself.... But the initiated mind Says this and that, Celebrating with dances The Ineffable Bythos.“

(Hymn III)

The ineffability of divine names was an old idea in Egypt, especially in the Osirian religion, where it forms the base of the story of Ra and Isis. So the name of Osiris himself was said to be ineffable. See Eug. Lefébure in Sphinx, Stockholm, vol. I. pp. 99-102. The name of Marduk of Babylon is in the same way declared ineffable in an inscription of Neriglissar, Trans. Roy. Soc. Litt. 2nd series, vol. VIII. p. 276. The name of Yahweh became ineffable directly after Alexander. See Halévy, Revue des Études juives, t. ix. (1884), p. 172. In every case, the magical idea that the god might be compelled by utterance of his secret name seems to be at the root of the practice. Cf. Erman, Life in Ancient Egypt, Eng. ed. p. 354.

Footnote 133:

The whole account of Ophite doctrine as to the origin of things is here taken from Irenaeus, Bk I. c. 28, pp. 226 sqq., Harvey.

Footnote 134:

Genesis i. 8.

Footnote 135:

Philo explains that there is a vast difference between man as now made and the first man who was made according to the image of God, De opificio mundi, c. 46. This idea of an archetypal man was widely spread over Eastern Europe and Asia, and Bousset, Hauptprobleme der Gnosis, Göttingen, 1907, Kap. IV., “Der Urmensch,” has collected all or nearly all the references to it in the literature of the period that could be produced up to that date. As to its origin, the issue is still very doubtful. While we should naturally expect to find it in the Babylonian legends, the Tablets of Creation contain no certain allusion to it, while it is certainly to be traced in the Zend Avesta and its related books. Until we are able to compare the dates of these two sources it seems idle to speculate as to which is the original one and which the derived. But see Introduction (pp. lxi-lxiii and note on last page quoted) supra.

Footnote 136:

This is a less primitive and therefore probably later way of accounting for the birth of one spiritual or superhuman being from another, than that of Simon Magus who made his Supreme Being androgyne.

Footnote 137:

Theocritus, Idyll, II. l. 34. For the identity of Hades and Dionysos see Chapter II. vol. I. supra.

Footnote 138:

Pausanias, Descpt. Graec. Bk VIII. cc. 17, 20; Arnobius, adv. Gentes, Bk V. cc. 5, 7. Cf. Decharme in Daremberg and Saglio’s Dict. des Antiq. s.v. Cybele.

Footnote 139:

See Chapter II. vol. I. supra.

Footnote 140:

Clem. Alex. Protrept. c. II.; Arnobius, op. cit. Bk VI. c. 21, calls it “the well-known senarian verse of a poet of Tarentum,” and connects it with the Sabazian rites, whence it probably found its way to Eleusis.

Footnote 141:

This relegation of the really Supreme God to an unregarded place in the pantheon is common enough in the history of religions. Thus the Shilluks of the Upper Nile take little notice of their great god Jôk, to whom they only sacrifice once a year, reserving all the rest of their worship for a being intermediate between God and man called Nyakang. See Gleichen, The Anglo-Egyptian Soudan, vol. I. pp. 162, 197, and R.H.R. 1911, Juillet-Août.

Footnote 142:

See n. 1, p. 31, supra. The Dea Syria was otherwise called Atargatis, of which Derketo was, teste Prof. Garstang, a homonym. See Strong, The Syrian Goddess, p. 52 and n. 25.

Footnote 143:

See n. 1, p. 31, supra.

Footnote 144:

Ramsay, Cities, etc., I. p. 9.

Footnote 145:

Irenaeus, op. cit. Bk I. c. 28, p. 227, Harvey.

Footnote 146:

ἀρσενόθηλυς, Hippolytus, op. cit. Bk V. c. 1, p. 139, Cruice.

Footnote 147:

See next note.

Footnote 148:

Ἀπὸ σοῦ πατὴρ καὶ διά σε μήτηρ, τὰ δύο ἀθάνατα ὀνόματα, Αἰώνων γονεῖς, πολῖτα οὐρανοῦ, μεγαλώνυμε ἄνθρωπε, Ηiρροlytus, op. cit. Bk V. c. 1, p. 140, Cruice. Salmon points out that almost the same words occur in Hippolytus’ account of the heresy of Monoimus the Arab, where he describes the monad as being among other things: Αὕτη μήτηρ, αὕτη πατήρ, τὰ δύο ἀθάνατα ὀνόματα, op. cit. Bk VIII. c. 12, p. 410, Cruice. He is inclined to attribute this to the real or supposed fact that both the Naassenes and Monoimus borrowed from the Apophasis of Simon. See Salmon in Dict. Christian Biog. s.v. Monoimus.

Footnote 149:

Τὸ δὲ πνεῦμα ἐκεῖ [ἐστιν] ὅπου καὶ ὁ Πατὴρ ὀνομάζεται καὶ ὁ Υἱός, ἐκ τούτου [καὶ ἐκ] τοῦ Πατρὸς ἐκεῖ γεννώμενον; κ.τ.λ., Ηippolytus, op. cit. Βk V. c. 9, pp. 174, 185, Cruice. The words in brackets are Cruice’s emendation. Duncker and Schneidewin omit them and read γεννώμενος for γεννώμενον. Giraud, op. cit. pp. 92, 93, agrees with Cruice’s reading, and points out that both the Spirit and the Son are here put forward as the masculine and feminine forms respectively of the great Adamas. It is evident, however, that among the earlier Ophites represented by Irenaeus’ Greek text, the Spirit or First Woman was thought to come into being after the First Man and the Son of Man. See Irenaeus, Bk I. c. 28, p. 227, Harvey.

Footnote 150:

Thus after saying that “he who says all things are composed (συνεστάναι) from one (substance) errs, but that he who says they are framed from three speaks the truth,” he goes on to say Mία γάρ ἐστι φησιν, ἡ μακαρία φύσις τοῦ μακαρίou ἄνθρωπου τοῦ ἄνω, τοῦ Ἀδάμαντος· μία δὲ ἡ θνητὴ κάτω· μία δὲ ἡ ἀβασίλευτος γενεὰ ἡ ἄνω γενομένη, κ.τ.λ., “For one is the blessed nature of the blessed Man above, viz.: Adamas, and one is the nature below which is subject to death, and one is the kingless race which is begotten above,” etc. Hippolytus, op. cit. Bk V. c. 8, p. 157, Cruice.

Footnote 151:

Hippolytus, op. cit. Bk V. c. 1, p. 140, Cruice.

Footnote 152:

ὰποκατάστασις (see p. 57 infra). As Salmon has shown with great clearness, this, rather than the redemption of individual souls, is the aim of all post-Christian Gnostic systems, Dict. Christian Biog. s.v. Gnosticism.

Footnote 153:

Philo, de Sacrificantibus, c. 13; II. p. 261, Mangey.

Footnote 154:

Acts xiv. 11-18.

Footnote 155:

Postea, dicunt, exultante primo homine cum filio suo super formositate Spiritus, hoc est foeminae, et illuminante eam, generavit ex ea lumen incorruptibile, tertium masculum, quem Christum vocant. So the Latin version of Irenaeus, Bk I. c. 28, p. 227, Harvey. The Greek text, which should contain Irenaeus’ own words, only says: Ἐρασθῆναι δέ φασι τὸν πρῶτον Ἄνθρωπον, καὶ τὸν δεύτερον, τῆς ὥpas τoῦ Πveύμaτoς ... καὶ παιδοποιῆσαι φῶς ... ὁ καλοῦσι Χριστόν. Something, however, has evidently been expunged from the earlier version of the story, and it is possible that the later interpolation is due to the desire of the translator to make the teaching of the heretics as repulsive as possible. Theodoret merely copies the Latin text of Irenaeus.

Footnote 156:

εἰς τὸν ἄφθαρτον ἀνασπασθῆναι Αἰῶνα, ἣν καὶ ἀληθινὴν ἐκκλησίαν καλοῦσι. Irenaeus, loc. cit. p. 228, Harvey.

Footnote 157:

This Divine Family or Council must have been an old idea in post-exilic Judaism. Justin Martyr, Dial. c. Tryph. c. 126, says that Christ is called the “Angel of the Great Council” by Ezekiel, but the expression is not to be found in the A.V. Origen, cont. Cels. Bk V. c. 53, also speaks of a prophecy in which Jesus was described as the “Angel of the Great Council, because he announced to men the great counsel of God”—a pun which curiously enough is the same in Greek as in English. The Jews of Elephantine worshipped in their temple a god and a goddess who were looked upon as the assessors, if the inferiors, of Yahweh (see n. 4, p. 32, supra). In the Talmud, it is said that God has an upper or celestial familia or tribunal without consulting which he does nothing, and which is indicated by the “holy ones” of Dan. iv. 17. See Taylor, Pirke-Aboth, Cambridge, 1877, II. p. 43, n. 7. The expression “Angel of the Great Council” recurs in the Gnostic epitaph from the Via Latina given later (Chapter IX).

Footnote 158:

Irenaeus, Bk I. c. 28, pp. 227, 228, Harvey.

Footnote 159:

Giraud, op. cit. p. 95, thinks that in the Naassene teaching matter does not really exist, all things being contained in Adamas. The absolute antagonism of God and matter is, however, too strongly marked a feature of nearly all the sources from which the Ophites can have drawn their doctrine for his theory to be entertained. Berger, Études des Documents nouveaux fournis sur les Ophites par les Philosophumena, Nancy, 1873, p. 25, puts forward the same idea as a mere figure of speech and in order apparently to reconcile the Ophite doctrine with St John’s statement that without the Word “nothing” was made. Later he (ibid. pp. 61, 104, 105) points out that the tendency of the Ophite like all other Gnostic doctrine is to widen rather than to narrow the abyss between Spirit and Matter.

Footnote 160:

This is a variant, and an important one, of the Babylonian myth which makes Bel, after defeating Tiamat the Dragon of Chaos, cut her in two halves and make out of them the visible heaven and earth. See Rogers, op. cit. p. 126. The heaven which there is fashioned from the powers of evil, is here at any rate half divine. In later systems, such as one of those in the Pistis Sophia and especially that of the Manichaeans, the older Babylonian idea is returned to. It would therefore seem that for the modification here introduced, the Ophites were indebted to Jewish influence and forced it to agree with the story of Genesis. See Irenaeus, op. cit. Bk I. c. 28, p. 229, Harvey.

Footnote 161:

Irenaeus, loc. cit. p. 228, Harvey. This is the first unmistakable allusion to the figure of the Sophia which is so prominent in most of the Gnostic systems and reappears in Manichaeism. There can, I think, be no doubt that she is in effect the Great Goddess worshipped throughout Western Asia, who appears under different names in Lydia, Phrygia, Syria, Ionia, Crete, and Greece, and who is to be identified on etymological grounds, if Prof. Garstang (n. 1, p. 31, supra) is correct, with the Babylonian Ishtar. That the Alexandrians saw her in their goddess Isis has already been shown in Chap. II. Her most prominent characteristics show her to be a personification of the Earth, the mother of all living, ever bringing forth and ever a virgin, as is shown in the “Goddesses Twain,” Demeter and Cora. The dove was throughout Asia her symbol and perhaps her totem animal (Strong, The Syrian Goddess, pp. 22-24 for authority), as the serpent was that of her spouse or male counterpart (Justin Martyr, First Apol. c. XXVII.; Clem. Alex. Protrept. c. II.). In the Orphic cosmogonies she appears under her name of Gaia or Ge as the “first bride” (Abel’s Orphica, fr. 91) spouse of Uranos, as well as under all her subsequent personifications. She seems, too, to bear much analogy with the Persian Amshaspand, Spenta Armaiti, who is also identified with the earth, and is called Sophia or Wisdom (Tiele, Religion of the Iranian Peoples, Eng. ed. Bombay, 1912, pp. 130, 131). Whether the Persians also drew this conception from the Babylonian Ishtar is a question which some years ago might have been answered in the affirmative. Now, however, it has been complicated by the identification of this Spenta Armaiti with the Aramati of the Vedas—for which see M. Carnoy’s article Aramati-Armatay in Le Muséon, Louvain, vol. XIII. (1912), pp. 127-146—and the discovery of Winckler that the Vedic gods were worshipped in Asia Minor before 1272 B.C. Her appearance in the cosmology of the Gnostics under the name of Sophia is, however, probably due to the necessity of effecting by hook or by crook a harmony between Gentile and Jewish ideas, and is doubtless due in the first instance to the passage in the Book of Proverbs VIII., IX., where Wisdom חָכְמָה or Ἀχαμώθ (in both languages feminine) is described as existing from the beginning and the daily delight of Yahweh, rejoicing always before him and his instrument in making the universe (Clem. Hom. XVI. c. 12). It is said that Simon Magus called his mistress Helena by the name of Sophia, but the story only occurs in Victorinus of Pettau and is probably due to a confusion with the Sophia of later sects like that of Valentinus. In all these, with the single exception of that of Marcion, she plays a predominant part in the destiny of mankind.

Footnote 162:

This appears in the Latin version of Irenaeus only.

Footnote 163:

Ὑφ’ ἑκάστου δὲ τούτων ἕνα οὐρανὸν δημιουργηθῆναι, καὶ ἕκαστον οἰκεῖν τὸν οἰκεῖον. Irenaeus, op. cit. Bk I. c. 28, p. 230, Harvey.

Footnote 164:

Origen, cont. Cels. Bk VI. c. 32. This Ialdabaoth or Jaldabaoth appears in the systems or heresies of the Nicolaitans and of those whom Epiphanius calls “Gnostics” par excellence. See Epiphanius, op. cit. Bk I. t. ii., Haer. 25, p. 160, and Haer. 26, p. 184. Theodoret, Haer. Fab. Bk V. c. 9, makes him belong also to the system of the Sethians. In all these he is the son of Sophia and presides over one or more of the super-terrestrial heavens, although the particular place assigned to him differs in the different sects. In the Pistis Sophia he is described (in the story of Pistis Sophia proper) as a power “half flame and half darkness” (cf. Ezekiel viii. 2) projected by one of the “triple-powered” gods of our universe and sent down into Chaos for the destruction of the heroine; in one of the later documents of the book we see him as lord of a particular portion of Chaos, where he presides over the punishment of a certain class of sinning souls. His name offers many difficulties. Gieseler reads it ילדא בהות, “son of Chaos,” and this Salmon, Dict. Christian Biog. s.h.v., considers the most probable derivation, although Harvey’s reading of יה־אל־דאבהות “Lord (or Jah) God of the Fathers,” is certainly more appropriate. In the great Magic Papyrus of Paris, the name appears as ⲁⲗⲑⲁⲂⲱⲧ, which can hardly be anything else that Aldabôt or Adabôt, since we have ⲁⲗⲑⲱⲛⲁⲓ for Adonai in the next line (Griffith, The Old Coptic magical texts of Paris, p. 3; extract from the Zeitschrift für Ägyptische Sprache, Bd. XXXVIII.). In Papyrus XLVI. of the British Museum (Kenyon, Gk. Pap. p. 69), we find βαλβναβαωθ, probably a clerical error for Jaldabaoth, which is again followed as before by the name Αδωναι. In the Leyden Papyrus which calls itself the “8th Book of Moses,” we have a god invoked as Aldabeim, which is there said to be an Egyptian name, and to be the φυσικὸν ὄνομα “natural name” of the sun and the boat in which he rises when he dawns upon the world (Leemans, op. cit. pp. 87, 119, 127). It is not at all certain, however, which of these is the right spelling, for the German editors of Hippolytus read in one place Esaldaios for Ialdabaoth, and the Magic Papyrus last quoted has a name Aldazaô which is said to be quoted from a book of Moses called Archangelicus (Leemans, op. cit. p. 157). The name Ialdazaô (“El Shaddai”?) is used as that of the “God of Gods” in the great Magic Papyrus of Paris, with whose name that of the aeon Sophia is mentioned (Wessely, Griech. Zauberpap. p. 50). The most probable conclusion is that Jaldabaoth represents some name or epithet of God current among the Semitic Babylonians which had fallen into disuse and had been much corrupted by being turned into and out of demotic. So Revillout (Revue Égyptologique) gives an instance where the invocation ἐπίσχες ἐπί με “Come unto me!” by a like process became transmogrified into “episkhesepimme” without being recognized by the scribe as Greek.

Footnote 165:

εἰδικὸς κόσμος, Hippolytus, op. cit. Bk V. c. 7, p. 153, Cruice. By the expression Demiurge he means that he fashioned it from pre-existent matter, as a workman builds a house.

Footnote 166:

Irenaeus, Bk I. c. 28, p. 230, Harvey.

Footnote 167:

Thus Irenaeus, Bk I. c. 18, p. 198, Harvey, in summarizing the teaching of Saturninus says that the god of the Jews was one of the (world-creating) angels. That Saturninus’ opinion was derived from or coincided with that of the Ophites, see Salmon, Dict. Christian Biog. s.v. Saturninus. Hippolytus Naassene also calls Jaldabaoth “a fiery god” and “a fourth number,” op. cit. Bk V. c. 7, p. 153, Cruice, in allusion to the text about God being a consuming fire and to his Tetragrammaton or four-lettered name. Epiphanius, Haer. XXXVII. c. 4, p. 500, Oehler, says Κaὶ οὗτός ἐστι, φασίν, ὁ θεὸς τῶν Ἰουδαίων ὁ Ἰαλδαβαώθ, “And this Ialdabaoth is, they [the Ophites] say, the God of the Jews.”

Footnote 168:

Origen, cont. Cels. Bk VI. c. 32.

Footnote 169:

Hippolytus, op. cit. Bk IV. c. 11.

Footnote 170:

See the picture by Faucher Gudin of the universe according to the Babylonians in Maspero, Hist. Ancienne des Peuples de l’ Orient Classique, Paris, 1895, t. I. p. 543.

Footnote 171:

Irenaeus, Bk I. c. 28, pp. 231, 232, Harvey. A sort of echo or perhaps a more detailed repetition of the story is found in one of the latest documents of the Pistis Sophia, where Jesus tells His disciples that the ἀρχοντες or rulers of Adamas once rebelled and persisted in begetting “archons and archangels and angels and serving spirits and decans”; that the 12 aeons, who are evidently the Signs of the Zodiac, divided into two companies of six, half of them under the rule of one Jabraôth repenting and being translated into a higher sphere, while the others were “bound” in our firmament under the rule of the five planets. Perhaps the origin of the whole story is the battle of the Gods and the serpent-footed giants, which appears on the Mithraic bas-reliefs, for which see P.S.B.A. 1912, p. 134, and Pl. XVI, 7. It is certainly of Asiatic or Anatolian origin, and seems to be connected with volcanic phenomena. Hippolytus, op. cit. Bk V. c. 13, p. 192, Cruice, says this rebellion is a “Chaldaean” doctrine.

Footnote 172:

τὸν δὲ ἀθυμήσαντα, εἰς τὴν τρύγα τῆς ὕλης ἐρεῖσθαι τὴν ἔννοιαν, καὶ γεννῆσαι υἱὸν ὀφιόμορφον ἐξ αὐτῆς, “and [they say that] he being enraged, beheld his thought in the dregs of matter, and a serpent-formed son was born from it,” Irenaeus, Bk I. c. 28, p. 232, Harvey. Perhaps this explains how the Ennoia or Thought of God was supposed to take definite shape. Other editors wish to read ἐρείδεσθαι “fixed” for ἐρεῖσθαι.

Footnote 173:

Hippolytus, Bk V. c. 9, p. 178, Cruice.

Footnote 174:

See n. 1, p. 45, supra. So Hippolytus, op. cit. Bk V. c. 9, p. 178, Cruice, when speaking of the Ophites frequenting the mysteries of the Magna Mater, says that there is no temple anywhere [he means in Phrygia] without a serpent. See Ramsay, Cities, etc., I. pp. 51, 87. As King, Gnostics and their Remains, p. 225, noted, all the principal cities of Asia Minor, Ephesus, Apamea and Pergamum depicted serpents on their coins. For the story of Alexander’s birth, see Budge, Alexander the Great (Pseudo-Callisthenes), p. 8.

Footnote 175:

See Ramsay in last note.

Footnote 176:

Acta Philippi (ed. Tischendorf), passim.

Footnote 177:

dehinc et Spiritum, et animam et omnia mundialia; inde generatum omnem oblivionem, et malitiam, et zelum, et invidiam, et mortem. Irenaeus, Bk I. c. 28, p. 232, Harvey. So Dionysos, whose emblem (Clem. Alex. Protrept. c. II.) was the serpent, is identified with the soul of the world. Cf. Berger, Études sur la Philosophumena, Nancy, 1873, pp. 39 sqq.

Footnote 178:

Hippolytus, op. cit. Bk V. c. 9, p. 178, Cruice.

Footnote 179:

Ibid. Bk V. c. 7, pp. 144, 145, Cruice.

Footnote 180:

Is this the origin of the ideas on the Macrocosm and the Microcosm? See Chapter XIII, infra.

Footnote 181:

See n. 3, p. 41, supra.

Footnote 182:

Cf. Charles, Book of the Secrets of Enoch, pp. 7, 57.

Footnote 183:

Irenaeus, Bk I. c. 28, p. 232, Harvey.

Footnote 184:

It is curious that she did not also mention herself or the First Woman.

Footnote 185:

This is the story of the earliest or Greek text; the Latin says that he said it to divert the minds of his rebellious sons.

Footnote 186:

Irenaeus, Bk I. c. 28, pp. 232-234, Harvey. This Adam is of course not to be confused with Adamas. Neither did he resemble the Adam of Genesis, for he is described as being immensum latitudine et longitudine. Harvey, ubi cit., gives many parallels to this from the Talmud and Cabala, which must be either taken directly from the Ophite author or borrowed from a common source. For Eve’s creation, see n. 2, p. 58, supra.

Footnote 187:

Cf. the vestures of light belonging to Jesus in the Pistis Sophia, Chapter X, infra. So Philo, Quaest. et Sol. in Gen. c. 53, explains that the coats of skin made by God for Adam and Eve are a “figure of speech” for a material body. Origen, in like manner (cont. Cels. Bk IV. c. 40), says that the clothing of the protoplasts in tunics of skin covers “a certain secret and mystic doctrine far exceeding Plato’s of the soul losing its wings and being borne to earth.”

Footnote 188:

Irenaeus, Bk I. c. 28, pp. 234-236, Harvey. The idea of the seven evil demons is a very old one in the East. See the Babylonian story of the assault of the seven evil spirits on the Moon. Sayce, Gifford Lectures, 1902, p. 430, in which those who like to rationalize ancient myths can see a lunar eclipse. We meet again with Sammael and Michael as names of one of them in the diagram to be described later.

Footnote 189:

Irenaeus, Bk I. c. 28, p. 237, Harvey.

Footnote 190:

The LXX or Greek version of the Old Testament belongs to the Western Diaspora rather than to the Eastern. Perhaps this was why Paul and Barnabas in addressing the Phrygians were careful to give them a summary of Old Testament history. See Acts xiii. 16 sqq.

Footnote 191:

The Sethians had a book called the Paraphrase of Seth now lost, which from its name may easily have been a heretical version of the Book of Genesis. See Hippolytus, op. cit. Bk V. c. 21, p. 223, Cruice.

Footnote 192:

Hippolytus, op. cit. Bk V. c. 7, p. 145, Cruice, says that this was first taught by the “Assyrians,” by which he evidently means the Syrians.

Footnote 193:

πλάσμα τὸ πήλινον, Hippolytus, op. cit. Bk V. c. 7, p. 153, Cruice.

Footnote 194:

This is certainly the opinion of the sect responsible for one of the later documents of the Pistis Sophia. See Pistis Sophia, pp. 346, 347, Copt. So Rossi’s Trattato gnostico, before quoted, speaks throughout of Satan or the chief of the powers of evil as the ἀρχηπλασμα “originator of the form”?

Footnote 195:

Hippolytus, see n. 1, supra.

Footnote 196:

Hippolytus, op. cit. Bk V. c. 7, p. 144, Cruice.

Footnote 197:

Ibid. Bk V. c. 8, pp. 157-173, Cruice.

Footnote 198:

A verse:

Son of Saturn, son of Jove Or born of mighty Rhea’s love. Holy name, that sounds so dear To that ancient Rhea’s ear. Thee the old Assyrians [read Syrians] all The thrice-wept Adonis call. To thee for name has Egypt given The holy horned moon of heaven [Osiris]. Thou the serpent-god of Greece The all reverenced Adam thou of Samothrace. Thee the Lydians, Phrygians thee, Invoke, the Corybantic deity. Thee Pappas now and now the dead, Now lifting up reborn the god-like head. Unfruitful now or barren desert brown, Now the rich golden harvest mowing down. Or whom the blossoming almond-tree Brought forth on the free hills the piper wild to be.

Attis, old Rhea’s son I sing Not with the wild bell’s clashing ring Nor Ida’s fife, in whose shrill noise The old Curetae still rejoice; But with the mingling descant sweet Of Phoebus’ harp, so soft, so sweet, Evan! Evan! Pan, I call! Evan the wild Bacchanal: Or that bright Shepherd that on high Folds the white stars up in the silent sky.

Quarterly Review, June, 1851.

Footnote 199:

πάνυ yὰp πικρῶς καὶ πεφυλαγμένως παραγγέλλουσιν ἀπέχεσθαι ὡς ἀποκεκομμένοι τῆς πρὸς γυναῖκα ὁμιλίας. “For they very strictly enjoin that their followers should abstain, as if they were castrated, from companying with women,” Hippolytus, op. cit. Bk V. c. 9, p. 177, Cruice.

Footnote 200:

Τουτέστι, φησίν, οὐδεὶς τούτων τῶν μυστηρίων ἀκροατὴς γέγονεν εἰ μὴ μόνοι οἱ γνωστικοὶ τελειοι. “This he (the Naassene writer) says signifies that none was a hearer of these mysteries save only the perfect Gnostics,” Hippolytus, op. cit. Bk V. c. 8, p. 144, Cruice. The “this” refers to the text: “He that hath ears to hear, let him hear.”

Footnote 201:

ἐκ τῶν σωμάτων τῶν χοϊκῶν ἀναγεννηθέντες πνευματικοὶ οὐ σαρκικοί “being born again from the earthly body, not as fleshly but as spiritual men”.... Οἱ δὲ αὐτοί, φησί, Φρύγες τὸν αὐτὸν πάλιν ἐκ μεταβολῆς λέγουσι θεόν. “Fοr the Phrygians themselves declare, he says, that he who is thus reborn is by reason of the change a god,” Hippolytus, op. cit. Bk V. c. 8, pp. 165, 166, Cruice. Cf. Berger, Études, etc. p. 27.

Footnote 202:

τῶν ἐπουρανίων καὶ ἐπιγείων καὶ καταχθονίων.

Footnote 203:

τὴν ἀσυμφωνίαν τοῦ κόσμον.

Footnote 204:

Hippolytus, op. et loc. cit. p. 165, Cruice.

Footnote 205:

The Naassene writer says that the peace preached “to those that are afar off” of Ephesians ii. 17, refers to τοῖς ὑλικοῖς καὶ χοϊκοῖς “to the material and earthly,” and that “to those that are near” to τοῖς πνευματικοῖς καὶ νοεροῖς τελείοις ἀνθρώποις “to the spiritual and understanding perfect men.” Hippolytus, op. et loc. cit.

Footnote 206:

Hippolytus, op. cit. Bk V. c. 8, pp. 172, 173, Cruice.

Footnote 207:

Cum accepisset concupiscentiam superioris luminis, et virtutem sumpsisset per omnia, deposuisse corpus et liberatam ab eo. Irenaeus, Bk I. c. 28, p. 229, Harvey. As he goes on to say: Corpus autem hoc exuisse dicunt eam, foeminam a foemina nominant, it is plain that he is here referring to the Third or Lower Sophia who was one of the personages in the Valentinian drama and unknown, so far as we can tell, to the Ophites. The Latin translator is no doubt responsible for this confusion.

Footnote 208:

That this was the object of Ialdabaoth in creating Eve is plain from Irenaeus’ Latin text (Bk I. c. 28, p. 233, Harvey): Zelantem autem Ialdabaoth voluisse excogitare evacuare hominem per foeminam, et de sua Enthymesi eduxisse foeminam, quam illa Prunicos suscipiens invisibiliter evacuavit a virtute. He then goes on to relate the seduction of the archons which plays so large a part in the Enochian literature, and which is made Sophia’s contrivance for nullifying the command to “Increase and multiply” in Genesis.

Footnote 209:

τὰ μικρὰ μυστήρια τὰ τῆς σαρκικῆς γενέσεως: Hippolytus, op. cit. Bk V. c. 8, p. 172, Cruice.

Footnote 210:

Hippolytus, op. cit. Bk V. c. 9, p. 177, Cruice.

Footnote 211:

Ibid. Bk V. c. 6, p. 140, Cruice.

Footnote 212:

Irenaeus, Bk I. c. 28, § 6, p. 238, Harvey. The section is given almost word for word as in Irenaeus; but it is manifestly taken from some other source than that of the Greek text, and is inconsistent with the rest of the story. If the Lower Sophia or Prunicos (the Substitute) were born from the mere boiling over of the light shed upon her mother, of what had she to “repent”? In the Pistis Sophia, indeed, the heroine wins her way back to her former estate by repentance, but her fall has been occasioned by disobedience and ambition. So, too, the story about Jesus changing His form on His descent through the seven heavens is common to the story of Pistis Sophia and the legend of Simon Magus, which two it therefore connects (see Chapter VI, vol. I. p. 191, n. 4). It also appears in the Ascension of Isaiah which Mr Charles thinks may be dated about 150 A.D. (see Charles, Ascension of Isaiah, 1900, pp. xi and 62), but which is probably of much later date. There are other features to be noted in their place common to the Pistis Sophia and the last named work.

Footnote 213:

That is to say, that which does not perish and return to the Deity.

Footnote 214:

Irenaeus, Bk I. c. 28, § 7, pp. 238-241, Harvey. This again is given almost verbatim. The stay of Jesus on earth after His Resurrection, and His teaching His disciples “quod liquidum est,” that is, without parable, is also told in the Pistis Sophia, but His post-Resurrection life is there put at 12 years. Irenaeus’ Latin translator has, as has been said, evidently here got hold of some later developments of Ophitism not known to his author at the time that the Greek text was written. Yet some tradition of a long interval between the Resurrection and the Ascension was evidently current in the sub-Apostolic age. Irenaeus himself says on the authority of “those who met with John the Disciple of the Lord in Asia” that Jesus’ ministry only lasted for one year from His Baptism, He being then 30 years old, and that He suffered on completing his 30th year; yet that He taught until He was 40 or 50 years old. See Irenaeus, Bk II. c. 33, § 3, p. 331, Harvey. Some part of this statement appears in the Greek text.

Footnote 215:

Epiphanius, Haer. XXXVII. c. 5, p. 502, Oehler. Epiphanius, although generally untrustworthy, had been, as M. de Faye reminds us, a Nicolaitan in his youth. See de Faye, Introd. p. 116.

Footnote 216:

Hippolytus, op. cit. Bk V. c. 10, pp. 182-184, Cruice.

Footnote 217:

Cruice, op. et loc. cit. p. 152, n. 3, remarks that the Supreme Triad here shown is τὸ νοερόν, τὸ χοϊκόν, τὸ ψυχικόν “the intellectual, the earthly, and the psychic or animal.” This may be; but there is no proof that the Ophites ever gave Chaos or unformed Matter a place in it, or made it the next principle to their Supreme Being. Probably for the supposed “Chaos” in the second line of the Psalm should be substituted some words like “the projected Thought” of the Father. Miller has some curious remarks quoted in the same note on the metre of the Psalm, which he points out is the same as in a poem of Lucian’s, and in the hymns of Synesius, Bishop of Ptolemais, already mentioned.

Footnote 218:

Hippolytus, op. cit. Bk V. c. 7, p. 148; ibid. c. 9, p. 181, Cruice. They probably resembled the ceremonies described at length in the Pistis Sophia and the Bruce Papyrus. See Chapter X, infra.

Footnote 219:

See p. 18 supra.

Footnote 220:

Giraud, op. cit. p. 95.

Footnote 221:

Sanctam autem hebdomadam septem stellas, quas dicunt planetas, esse volunt. Irenaeus, Bk I. c. 28, § 5, p. 236, Harvey.

Footnote 222:

Hippolytus, op. cit. Bk V. c. 8, p. 159, Cruice, says that the “nothing” said in John i. 3, 4 to have been made without the Word is in fact this world. Τὸ δὲ “οὐδέν, ὃ χωρὶς αὐτοῦ γέγονεν, ὁ κόσμος ἰδικός ἐστιν · γέγονεν γὰρ χωρὶς αὐτοῦ ὑπὸ τρίτου καὶ τετάρτον.” “But the ‘nothing’ which came into being without Him is the world of form; for it came into being without Him by the Third and Fourth”—these last being evidently Sophia and Jaldabaoth respectively.

Footnote 223:

Οὐ δύναται οὖν, φησι, σωθῆναι ὁ τέλειος ἄνθρωπος, ἐὰν μὴ ἀναγεννηθῇ διὰ ταύτης εἰσελθὼν τῆς πύλης. “The perfect [or initiated] man, he says, therefore cannot be saved unless he be born again, entering in through this gate.” Hippolytus, op. cit. Bk V. c. 8, p. 165, Cruice.

Footnote 224:

Hippolytus, op. cit. Bk V. c. 7, p. 144, Cruice.

Footnote 225:

Clem. Alex. Strom. Bk III. c. 13, and n. 2, p. 196, Chapter VI, vol. I. The οὔτε ἄρρεν οὔτε θῆλυ of this passage and of Clement’s Second Epistle to the Romans (Hilgenfeld, N.T. extra canon. pt I., p. 79) is compared by the Naassene author (Hipp. op. cit. Bk V. c. 7, p. 146, Cruice) with the emasculation of Attis, which is made a type of the soul “passing from the material parts of the lower creation to the eternal substance above.”

Footnote 226:

The Naassenes had priests. Οἱ οὖν ἱερεῖς καὶ προστάται τοῦ δόγματος γεγένηνται πρῶτοι οἱ ἐπικληθέντες Ναασσηνοί. “The priests and chiefs of the doctrine have been the first who were called Naassenes.” Hippolytus, op. cit. Bk V. c. 6, p. 139, Cruice. Cf. also p. 77, infra.

Footnote 227:

As we have seen, Aelius Aristides says the devotees of the Alexandrian gods used to bury holy books in their tombs. See Chapter II, vol. I. p. 60, supra.

Footnote 228:

See Chapter IV, supra.

Footnote 229:

I have taken the earliest date for which there is any probability, because it was in Hadrian’s time that most of the great Gnostics taught, and their speculations would therefore have been most likely to come to heathen ears. Keim, Celsus Wahres Wort, Zürich, 1873, however, makes the date of the book 177-178 A.D., and this seems supported by the latest critics. See Patrick, Apology of Origen, 1892, p. 9, where the question is thoroughly examined.

Footnote 230:

Origen, cont. Cels. Bk VI. c. 24.

Footnote 231:

See Matter, Histoire du Gnosticisme, Paris, 1843, Pl. III, and Giraud, op. cit. Pl. facing p. 238.

Footnote 232:

Origen, cont. Cels. Bk VI. c. 38. The fact is significant as showing that the Ophites considered the Son as contained within the Father.

Footnote 233:

ἐπιγεγραμμένον διάφραγμα πελεκοιειδεῖ σχήματι, Origen, op. et loc. cit. The πέλεκυς or double-bladed axe was the symbol of Zeus Labrandos of Caria, and is often met with on the coins of Asia Minor, while it seems to have played a prominent part in the worship of Minoan Crete and in Mycenae. See Arthur Evans, Mycenaean Tree and Pillar Cult, 1901, pp. 8-12. Ramsay, Cities, etc., I. c. 91, thinks that Savazos or Sabazios was called in Phrygia Lairbenos, which may be connected with the word Labrys said to be the name of the double axe. He found a god with this weapon worshipped together with Demeter or Cybele in the Milyan country, op. cit. pp. 263, 264, and he thinks the pair appear under the different names of Leto, Artemis, Cybele, and Demeter on the one hand, and Apollo, Lairbenos, Sabazios, Men, and Attis on the other throughout Asia Minor. He points out, however, that they were only the male and female aspects of a single divinity (op. cit. 93, 94). Is it possible that this is the explanation of the double axe as a divine symbol? The axe with one blade was the ordinary Egyptian word-sign for a god (see P.S.B.A. 1899, pp. 310, 311) and the double axe might easily mean a god with a double nature. If this idea were at all prevalent in Anatolia at the beginning of our era, it would explain Simon Magus’ mysterious allusion to the flaming sword of Genesis iii. 24, “which turns both ways to guard the Tree of Life,” and is somehow connected with the division of mankind into sexes. See Hippolytus, op. cit. Bk VI. c. 17, p. 260, Cruice. A very obscure Coptic text which its discoverer, M. de Mély, calls “Le Livre des Cyranides” (C. R. de l’Acad. des Inscriptions, Mai-Juin, 1904, p. 340) gives a hymn to the vine said to be sung in the Mysteries of Bacchus in which the “mystery of the axe” is mentioned.

Footnote 234:

Origen, op. et loc. cit. The names of the circles, etc., in the original are from above downwards: Ἀγάπη, Ζωή, Πρόνοια, Σοφίας, Γνῶσις, Σοφία, Φύσις, and Σύνεσις.

Footnote 235:

Gnosis does appear in the Naassene Psalm given in this Chapter, but only as the name of the “Holy Way.”

Footnote 236:

See n. 1, p. 58 supra.

Footnote 237:

In this it is following strictly the tradition of the Enochian literature. “And we ascended to the firmament, I and he, and there I saw Sammael and his hosts, and there was great fighting therein and the angels of Satan were envying one another.” Charles, Ascension of Isaiah, c. VII. v. 9, p. 48, and Editor’s notes for other references.

Footnote 238:

Origen, cont. Cels. Bk VI. c. 32. Horaios is probably connected with the root אור “light”; Astaphaios appears in the earliest texts as Astanpheus. which may be an anagram for στέφανος “crown.” Or it may be חשטפה “inundation” which would agree with Origen’s statement as to this being the principle of water, for which see p. 73 infra.

Footnote 239:

Op. cit. Bk VI. c. 31.

Footnote 240:

Unless we take the ten circles as including the three gates of Horaios, Ailoaios, and Astaphaios. In this case, Jaldabaoth and his first three sons would alone form the higher part of the planetary world. This is unlikely, but if it were so, there would be an additional reason for calling Jaldabaoth, as does Irenaeus, a “fourth number.” Theodore Bar Khôni, who wrote in the viiith century (see Chapter XIII, infra), in his notice of the Ophites gives the number of these heavens as ten. See Pognon, Coupes de Khouabir, Paris, 1898, p. 213.

Footnote 241:

ἐπὶ τοῦ κύκλου καὶ τοῦ κέντρου αὐτοῦ κατέγραψε, Origen, οp. cit. Bk VI. c. 25.

Footnote 242:

Origen says, loc. cit., that Leviathan is Hebrew for “Dragon.” Cf. Ps. civ. 26.

Footnote 243:

That is to say: Jaldabaoth; Iao, which is probably one of the many attempts to represent in Greek the Tetragrammaton יהוה called in English Jehovah; Ailoaios or Eloaios, the singular of the well-known plural name of God in Genesis אלהים “Elohim”; and Adonai, אדני, “the Lord,” which in many parts of the O.T. replaces the Tetragrammaton. Harvey, however, op. cit. p. 33, n. 3, thinks Iao may simply represent the initial of the name of Yahweh coupled with Alpha and Omega to show His eternal nature. He connects this with “I am the first and the last” of Isaiah xliv. 6, and Rev. i. 11. Yet the later Greeks called Dionysos Iao. See the (probably spurious) oracle of Apollo Clarius quoted by Macrobius, Saturnalia, Bk I. c. 18, II. 19 sqq.

Footnote 244:

Giraud, op. cit. p. 230.

Footnote 245:

πύλας ἀρχόντων αἰῶνι δεδεμένας: Origen, cont. Cels. Bk VI. c. 31. Perhaps we should read διδομένας, “Gates which belong to the age of the Archons,” i.e. while their rule lasts.

Footnote 246:

See the quotation from the Gospel of Philip later in this chapter, p. 79, infra.

Footnote 247:

This appears to be the sphere of the Sun to which the epithet μονότροπον “one-formed” is not inappropriate. Why he should be called δεσμὸν ἀβλεψίας “bond of blindness,” and λήθην ἀπερίσκεπτον “thoughtless oblivion,” does not appear. πρώτην δύναμιν πνεύματι προνοίας καὶ σοφίᾳ τηρουμένην “the first power preserved,” etc. coincides curiously with what is said in the Pistis Sophia as to the Ship of the Sun and the “Virgin of Light.”

Footnote 248:

This seems to be the sphere of Saturn, the furthest or 7th reckoning from the earth and therefore according to the astronomy of the time the nearest to the upper heavens. Was the symbol of life the Egyptian ♀ or ankh? It was of course the jealous Jaldabaoth’s or Ialdabaoth’s wish that no human souls should penetrate beyond his realm.

Footnote 249:

So the Pistis Sophia speaks repeatedly of the “Little Iao the Good.” This should be the sphere of the Moon. In the hymn to Attis given in this chapter, see n. 6, p. 54 supra, Attis-Dionysos-Osiris is identified with “the holy horned moon of heaven.” and the name Iao may be connected with the Coptic ⲒⲞϨ ioh or “moon.” He may be called the πρῶτος δεσπότης θανάτου “first lord of death,” because Osiris, like Dionysos, was the first to return to life after being torn in pieces. The φέρων ἤδη τὴν ἰδίαν σύμβολον “bearing my own beard as a symbol” seems to refer to the attitude of the Egyptian dead, who is represented as holding his beard in his right hand when introduced into the presence of Osiris. See Budge, Book of the Dead, 1898 (translation volume), frontispiece, or Papyrus of Ani, ibi cit.

Footnote 250:

This may be the sphere of Jupiter, who in one of the later documents of the Pistis Sophia is made ruler of the five planets. Sabaoth is probably the Divine Name צבאות “[Lord of] Hosts” which the Greeks took for a proper name. It, like Iao, appears often in the later documents. The πεντὰς δυνατωτέρα “mightier Pentad” may refer to the Three Men (Adamas, his son, and Christos), and the Two Women (the First Woman and Sophia) placed at the head of the universe by the Ophites.

Footnote 251:

This should be the sphere of Mercury, the messenger of the gods and leader of souls, who, unlike the higher powers, sees the earth from anigh and without veils. The παρθένου πνεῦμα “spirit of a Virgin” may be the Virgin of Light of the Pistis Sophia, who plays such an important part in the redemption of souls. Hippolytus’ Naassene writer (Hipp. op. cit. Bk V. c. 9, p. 181, Cruice) speaks of Jesus as the true gate and talks in this connection of “Life-giving water” and of “we Christians celebrating the mystery in the third gate”—an allusion which is unintelligible at present, unless it refers to the waters of baptism.

Footnote 252:

The sphere of Venus? The planet is said in one of the later documents of the Pistis Sophia to be ruled by a power from “Pistis Sophia, the daughter of Barbelo,” another name for the material antitype of the heavenly Sophia or Mother of Life, whom we shall meet with later.

Footnote 253:

The sphere of Mars? No allusion is made elsewhere to the φραγμὸν πυρὸς “fence of fire”; but we do of course often hear of an empyrean or heaven of fire stretching over the earth. The ζωῆς ξύλον is, according to both Origen and Celsus, the Cross; Origen, op. cit. Bk VI. cc. 34, 37.

Footnote 254:

The proper order would appear to be:

(1) Horaios ♂ the guardian of the First Gate, i.e. that of Fire.

(2) Ailoaios ♀ the guardian of the Second Gate, i.e. that of Air.

(3) Astaphaios ☿ the guardian of the Third Gate, i.e. that of Water.

Above these we have (4) Adonai the ☉ the first power as distinguished from mere porters or guardians of gates, (5) Iao the ☽ called in the password the second, and (6) and (7) Sabaoth ♃ and Jaldabaoth ♄ above all. This would about correspond with the astronomy of the time, which tried to put the sun in the centre of our system. But the relative places of Sabaoth, Jaldabaoth, and Ailoaios are very uncertain, and Epiphanius in describing the Ophite sect whom he calls “Gnostics” says that some wished to make Ialdabaoth occupy the 6th heaven, and others Ailoaios, called by him Elilaios, while giving the 7th to Sabaoth. Epiph. Haer. XXVI. c. 10, p. 174, Oehler.

Footnote 255:

Origen, cont. Cels. Bk VI. c. 31. If ♄ corresponds to Michael and also to Jaldabaoth, ♃ ought to do the like to Suriel and Iao, ♂ to Sabaoth (which would be appropriate enough) and to Raphael, the sun to Adonai and Gabriel, and so on. No system of correspondences, however, can be devised that does not break down on scrutiny. Sammael, which is here Michael’s other name, is used in the Ascensio Isaiae (see Charles, Ascension of Isaiah, p. 6) as a name of Satan. But it may well be that good and bad spirits occupying corresponding places in the universe were sometimes called by the same names. So one of the documents of the Pistis Sophia speaks of an angel cryptically named Zarazaz “who is called by the demons after a strong demon of their own place, Maskelli”: Pistis Sophia, p. 370, Copt.

Footnote 256:

Though Babylonian in origin it must early have found its way into Egypt. See Maspero, Ét. Égyptol. II. p. 385 and Chapter VI, supra, vol. I. p. 183 and n. 3.

Footnote 257:

Soul, perhaps, does not here mean anything more than animating principle, spark, or breath of life.

Footnote 258:

See p. 42, supra.

Footnote 259:

τοὺς τελείους ἀβασιλεύτοὐς γενέσθαι καὶ μετασχεῖν τοῦ πληρώματος, Hippolytus, op. cit. Bk V. c. 8, p. 168, Cruice. See also the same expression in n. 3, p. 41, supra.

Footnote 260:

Origen’s testimony on this point can be the better relied on, because his good faith, unlike that of writers like Epiphanius, is above suspicion. He and Clement of Alexandria are the only two writers on Gnosticism among the Fathers to whom M. de Faye (Introd. p. 1) will allow “intelligence” and “impartialité.”

Footnote 261:

He gives, op. cit. p. 79, a map showing their chief seats from the head of the Persian Gulf on the one hand to Crete and the Adriatic on the other.

Footnote 262:

In the Bruce Papyrus mentioned in Chapter X, there is much said about a god called Sitheus, so that it is by no means certain that the Seth after whom they were named was the patriarch of Genesis. He might be the Egyptian Set, whose name is transliterated in the Magic Papyri as Σηϊθ. His appearance in Egypt first as the brother and then as the enemy of Osiris has never been fully accounted for. See “The Legend of Osiris,” P.S.B.A. for 1911, pp. 145 sqq. Epiphanius’ attempt in the Panarion (Haer. XXXIX. c. 3, p. 524, Oehler) to connect the genealogy of Jesus with the Seth of Genesis is not even said to depend on the doctrines of the sect, and the whole chapter reads like an interpolation. Cf. Friedländer, Vorchristliche jüdische Gnosticismus, Göttingen, 1898, p. 25.

Footnote 263:

Praedestinatus, de Haeresibus, Bk I. c. 17, p. 237, Oehler.

Footnote 264:

Matter, Hist. du Gnost. t. II. p. 176.

Footnote 265:

See Acta Philippi before quoted passim.

Footnote 266:

Irenaeus, Bk I. c. 28, § 8, p. 241, Harvey. King, Gnostics, etc. p. 101, quotes from Tertullian, de Praescript., “Serpentem magnificant in tantum ut etiam Christo praeferant,” which sounds like an Ophite doctrine; but I have failed to verify the quotation.

Footnote 267:

Theodoret, Haer. Fab. I. 24.

Footnote 268:

Pistis Sophia, pp. 319, 320, Copt.

Footnote 269:

Ibid. p. 384, Copt.

Footnote 270:

Hippolytus, op. cit. Bk V. c. 13, pp. 188 sqq., Cruice.

Footnote 271:

See Giraud, op. cit. pp. 250 sqq. for references and editions. English translations of some of them have appeared in the “Apocryphal Acts” etc. of Clark’s Ante-Nicene Library, and in Cambridge Texts and Studies.

Footnote 272:

This is the opinion of Lipsius. See Dict. Christian Biog. s.v. Gospels, Apocryphal.

Footnote 273:

Cf. the similar expressions in the speech of the soul on the Orphic Gold Plates, Chapter IV, vol. I. pp. 131 sqq.

Footnote 274:

Epiphanius, Haer. XXVI. c. 13, p. 190, Oehler.

Footnote 275:

Ibid. p. 172, Oehler. Cf. the “Logia Jesu” published by the Egypt Exploration Fund in Oxyrhynchus Papyri, 1898, p. 3. “Wherever there are two, they are not without God, and wherever there is one alone, I say I am with him. Raise the stone, and there thou shalt find me, cleave the wood and there am I.”

Footnote 276:

Pistis Sophia, pp. 206, 230, Copt.

Footnote 277:

Grüber, Die Ophiten, Würzburg, 1864, pp. 173 sqq., points out that the Ophites, like the Valentinians, seem to have used the Peshitto or Syriac version of the Canonical Books for their quotations. He says the fact had been already noticed by Harvey. It is, of course, another indication of the Anatolian or Syrian origin of the sect.

Footnote 278:

Irenaeus, I. 28, c. 5, p. 237, Harvey, gives a list of the books which they assigned to each planetary power, Jaldabaoth taking the lion’s share with the Hexateuch, Amos and Habbakuk.

Footnote 279:

Hippolytus, op. cit. Bk V. c. 7, p. 150, Cruice. Proverbs xxiv. 16 seems the text referred to.

Footnote 280:

Hippolytus, op. cit. Bk V. c. 25, pp. 226, 227, Cruice. Sophia is evidently the serpent in this combination.

Footnote 281:

The Ebionites, or whatever other Judaeo-Christian sect is responsible for the Clementines, make St Peter affirm that Jesus “did not proclaim Himself to be God,” and that “that which is begotten cannot be compared with that which is unbegotten or self-begotten.” See Clem. Hom. XVI. cc. 15, 16.

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