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 2 to keep them all in mind, together with their secret rites which are justly to be called orgies, inasmuch as those who dare such things are not far from God's wrath to use the word in its etymological sense.

. About Simon. 7. It seems then right now to set forth also the (doings) of Simon, Simon Magus, the convert of Phillip the Evangelist, is said by all patristic writers to be at once the first teacher and the founder of all (post-Christian) Gnosticism; but until the discovery of our text our knowledge of his doctrines hardly went further than the statements of St. Irenæus and Epiphanius that he claimed to he the Supreme Being. The only other light on this subject came from Theodoret, who, writing in the fifth century, discloses in a few brief words the assertion by Simon of a system of æons or inferior powers emanating from the Divinity by pairs. It is plain that in this, Theodoret must have either borrowed from, or used the same material as, our author, and it is now seen that Simon's æaons were said by him to be six in number, the sources of all subsequent being, and to be considered under a double aspect. On the one hand, they were names or attributes of God like the Amshaspands of Zoroastrianism or the Sephiroth of the Jewish Cabala; and on the other they were identified with natural objects such as Heaven and Earth, Sun and Moon, Earth and Water, thereby forming a link with the Orphic and other cosmogonies current in Greece and the East. We now learn, too, for the first time that Simon taught, like the Ophites, that the Supreme Being was of both sexes like his antitypes, that the universe consisted of three worlds reflecting one another, and that man must achieve his salvation by coming to resemble the Deity—a result which was apparently to be brought about by finding his twin soul and uniting himself to her. None of these ideas seem to have been Simon's own invention, and all are found among those of earlier or later Gnostics. Hence their appearance has here given rise to the theories, put forward in the first instance by German writers, but also adopted by some English ones, that the Simon of our text was not the magician of the Acts but an heresiarch of the same name who flourished in the second century, and that the opponent of St. Peter covers under the same name the personality of St. Paul. Neither theory seems to have any foundation. the man of Gitto, a village of Samaria, whereby we shall show that those also who followed (him) taking hints from other names have ventured upon like things.