THREE
HOW TO BE A SUPERMAN
The First Gnostic
[. . .] their more secret rites, of which it is said that he who first hears them will be astonished and according to a written expression current among them will be made to marvel, are truly full of marvel and frenzy and madness, for they are such that not only can they not be committed to writing but, because of their obscenity and unspeakable conduct, cannot be mentioned by the lips of decent men. For, whatever might be conceived as more foul than all baseness, all this the utter abomination of the heresy of these men has outdone who make sport of wretched women truly weighed down with every kind of evil.
These shock-horror words were employed by the Origenist Eusebius (ca. 184–ca. 253), bishop of Caesarea (after 313), to describe the followers of Simon Magus and his consort Helen.1 Taking his information from Justin Martyr’s first Apology to Emperor Antoninus Pius (ca. 147–ca. 161), and from the later Irenaeus, Eusebius, writing between the late 290s and 324 CE, accepts the church tradition that Simon Magus was “the first author of all heresy,” by which Eusebius means Simon was the first to challenge the apostles with doctrines, which, Eusebius believes, formed the basis for subsequent Gnostic-type beliefs and practices.
Justin Martyr furnished the information that Simon the magician was born in Gittho, a village of Samaria (near modern Nablus, identified with Kuryet Jit) and that he was active in Samaria during Claudius’s reign (40s and 50s CE). His followers worshipped him as the “first God” and as “the Great Power of God.” He was also known as “the standing one,” a word with apocalyptic, John the Baptist–related meaning (see my book The Mysteries of John the Baptist). According to the very late Jewish-Christian propagandist work, the anti-Pauline Pseudo-Clementine Romance (ca. 325 CE), Simon was a colleague of John the Baptist, and had Simon not been in Alexandria when John was executed (ca. 36 CE), he would have succeeded John.
An intriguing story told by Josephus2 of a Samaritan hothead who whipped up the people to gather for a procession from Tirathaba up to the Samaritans’ holy mountain and temple at Mount Gerizim (close to Nablus) in Samaria in 36 or 37 CE, sounds a lot like the Simon who, according to patristic writers, was worshipped by huge numbers in Samaria and whose magical operations seriously troubled the apostles. Samaritans did not recognize Jerusalem as the site of God’s temple. In fact, this unnamed Samaritan who excited a large assembly of people into believing that the sacred vessels of Moses were secreted in Mount Gerizim (as Josephus relates) was the indirect cause of a major atrocity at Tirathaba when the people gathered in anticipation of a revelation at Mount Gerizim. The Tirathaba gathering coincided with Syrian governor Vitellius’s preparations for a march south through Samaria against Nabataea. Fearing a Samaritan insurrection could frustrate Vitellius’s plans, Prefect of Judaea Pontius Pilate dispatched cavalry to Tirathaba, ordering the strongest of those captured to be killed. Luke 13:1–5’s reference to a Roman slaughter of “Galileans,” may reflect the atrocity, for the Roman military regarded the word “Galilean” as synonymous with “troublemaker”; it could have referred both to Samaritan nationalists or zealots from Galilee. In fact it was the Samaritan senate’s complaint to Vitellius over Pilate’s conduct that led to Pilate’s being directed to Rome to answer for himself in 37 CE, a process apparently stalled by the Emperor Tiberius’s death and Caligula’s accession. These events, I argue in my book The Mysteries of John the Baptist, conditioned the trial and crucifixion of Jesus, which I confidently date to March of that year.
There is certainly enough information about Simon (who shared his name with the pillar of the church better known as Peter) to enable us to treat the account of Simon in Acts as simply another piece of the mysterious jigsaw puzzle in which the historical existence of Simon Magus is scattered.
The links that Acts makes between Simon and the baptizing activities of Philip are intriguing in this respect. According to Acts, Simon received the water-baptism of Philip but proved to be more interested, the story goes, in the reception of the Holy Spirit from the hands of Peter. If Simon Magus was a colleague of John the Baptist, then he had no need of Philip’s ministrations. Perhaps it was Apostle Philip who was, or had been, involved with John’s or Simon’s entourage, or both.
It seems likely that church tradition at the time of the composition of Acts required a narrative showing Simon as a condemned breakaway from Jesus’s salvation, and not an independent religious genius. We know there are serious problems in trying to understand the primitive church’s relations with John’s baptism and followers, glossed over in Acts. We may also note that the figure of Apollos in Acts (18:24–25), and from Paul’s letters (viz. I Corinthians 1:12), who knows and preaches only John’s baptism—deficient according to Paul—came from Alexandria. Paul claims to have come to an accommodation with him, but he and Apollos went their separate ways, anyway. If only we had a time machine to see how all of this really fit together on the ground at the time! I’m sure it was very different from the traditionally entertained sequence of events.
A notable and possibly telling absence from the Acts account of Simon trying to buy the magic of the Holy Spirit is any note of the presence of Simon’s feminine consort. All other accounts of Simon are consistent in naming her as Helen or Helena, and all accounts make it clear that this woman was not only his constant traveling companion but was a central figure and symbol of his personal cult. Intriguingly, the Greek Helenē means “torch”; she is a source of illumination. Simon apparently made much of the mythology surrounding her alleged incarnation as Helen of Troy, daughter of Zeus and Leda, who was kidnapped into earthly incarceration by Paris (a parallel with archontic conceit). The name encapsulated a complete Gnostic symbol.
Simonians worshipped images of Simon and Helen at their assemblies, offering sacrifices and libations before them: a scandalous idea to the orthodox and one universally regarded by heresiologists as typically, blasphemously Gnostic. Carpocratians were also accused of worshipping pictures of their spiritual and philosophical heroes, including Jesus. Pictures of Jesus are now, of course, commonplace in churches, places of entertainment, and bedrooms.
We have the at-first-sight rather colorful story of Simon discovering Helen in a brothel in Tyre, Phoenicia, and realizing that this ignominiously oppressed whore was his lost Idea or First Thought from primal times before he, Simon, as first God, got wrapped up in the creation of the cosmos and its demonic rulers: rulers who progressively raped and abused Helen through a series of vicious incarnations. Simon’s followers, who Eusebius asks us to believe, persisted—rather remarkably—into the fourth century, held the two as an eternal syzygy, promising liberation from the powers of the world. Helen was perhaps the original “tart with a heart.”
One can hardly escape the feeling that this story of Simon and his redeemed prostitute has some historical truth behind it, for, in it, do we not get a glimpse of the remarkable, alienated, naughty humor of this curious Samaritan egotist whom church history regarded as a victim of his own stupendous pride?
Believing he could fly, goes the apocryphal story of wide patristic currency, Peter challenged Simon to a duel in Rome: a duel of wills. Simon did, according to the Acts of Peter and other apocryphal accounts, fly by magic, but Peter implored the Lord to quash the demons sustaining Simon’s flight. Simon died, apparently, from wounds so inflicted, and was, according to Justin Martyr, honored in Rome with a statue and inscription. This alleged Simonian inscription was discovered on an island in the Tiber in 1574, its dedication addressed to the god Sancus, not Simon; either Justin Martyr’s Latin was not very good or he received the tale as hearsay! The story of Simon’s fatal flight was retold in Paul Newman’s first starring vehicle, The Silver Chalice (1954), where in a nuanced and villainous role, the splendidly sinister Jack Palance played Simon. Paul Newman regretted the film, but it is a brave outpost of maverick creativity in a timid early-1950s Hollywood that just doesn’t quite come off, being a trifle too artistic (Symbolist tropes dominate), experimental, and otherworldly for its own good: a bit like Simon Magus perhaps. In 1994–1995, Columba Powell and I wrote a comedic time-travel movie script with Simon Magus as the main protagonist, searching for Helen in the 1920s movie industry, with a cunning plan to go back to the first century and film the Resurrection! Yet to appear, The Gatecrashers (as we called the script) at least testifies that contrary to Simon’s patristic opponents, he is still the standing one and has not yet lain down and disappeared for the church’s convenience.
I hope readers will forgive the digression, but it gives us a flavor of the remarkable individual or, if you prefer, crazy son of a bitch who all the heresiologists are content to see as the father of the “gnosis falsely so-called.” If they were right about this—a supposition very far from certain—Simon Magus would have to be a larger-than-life character, and it is distressing, in a way, that it is practically impossible to get beyond the image of him painted (but not worshipped) by his enemies, the “straight-teachers” or orthodox, who have loathed and reviled him and everything he stood or stands for to this very day.
SEX AND SIMON
Besides Acts, Justin Martyr’s was the first account of Simon, coming less than a century after Simon’s adventurous heyday. What I think cries out from Justin’s, admittedly hostile, account is that from the very start, we cannot avoid the fact that sex has a lot to do with Simon’s image in the minds of heresiologists, and what’s more, sex has a lot to do with Simon himself and his self-regarding proclamations. Was he providing an ironic, superior, knowing comment on the claims of a certain messiah active in Phoenicia as well as Galilee and Judea? Was Simon’s the kind of creative mind that could have written a Life of Brian, to show the fallacies eagerly entertained by the “sheep” that thoughtlessly follow signs and wonders? For Simon knew all about signs and wonders: they were his stock-in-trade. Like Turner (as played by Mick Jagger) in Nick Roeg and Donald Cammell’s fabulous 1969 movie Performance, Simon knew a thing or two about performing. He could do more than juggle, my friend. He could play the crowds. As Turner says in that infinitely fascinating spectacle: The performance that counts, the one that really “makes it” . . . is the one that achieves madness!
What are we to make of a man who picks up a whore in a brothel, a despised person, and makes of her his queen of heaven? Is he a romantic? Helen is a whore. Simon befriends her, makes her his equal. What a duo they must have been! But were they acting? Was it all a pose, like Aleister Crowley and his “Scarlet Women,” or was it, like Crowley again, a pose, but something profound as well? For the time being, we must content ourselves with the reports of the heresiologists. That’s a pity, I know, but this isn’t a film, it’s an investigation, let us not forget, into Gnostic sex.
The theme of jealous angels “coming on” as God, appears in the earliest stratum of Simonian discourse, but we cannot be sure how much of this was backdated to the mid-first century by second-century “Gnosticized” Simonians. It is possible that Simon’s alleged followers in the second and fourth centuries were already Gnostics who fastened their outlook onto the legends of Simon: stories about him made him a very eligible candidate for Gnostic mythologizing. However, it is also possible that Simon self-mythologized and interpreted his own experience through an extravagantly synthetic, and original, personal mythos to impress impressionable audiences. According to opponents, he was quite prepared to assume another’s identity. Thus, the story goes, he claimed he had appeared as the Son among Jews, as the Father in Samaria, and as the Holy Spirit among other nations. His fame during his own lifetime, however, seems to have been built less on theological audacities than on the ability to deceive the eye by “miracles”; how much of his magic was pure trickery, how much occult, and how much enlightened manipulation of public ignorance, we cannot now know. Whatever he did, he was very good at it, and it was clearly threatening to the primitive church.
The connection between Simon’s First Thought—almost certainly a product of Alexandrian Sophia speculation—and the Helen compelled to operate in a Tyrian brothel is highly resonant, when we consider the second-century Gnostic presentation of Wisdom as both virgin and whore: she who gives herself freely but remains ever pure, she who has “mucked in” with the world, deeply involved in its evolution, while remaining radiantly, and resolutely, divine, literally untouched by progress; she whom the world cannot denigrate. I can imagine a clever, perhaps too clever, man using such ideas to glorify his activities, selling the yarn to his followers; unless, of course, he genuinely believed Helen was in fact the Wisdom abused through time, subject to reincarnations by wicked angels. We have an echo of such ideas perhaps in the usually sentimentalized traditions regarding Jesus’s “hanging out” (as we might say today) with prostitutes, coming to the rescue of a woman taken in flagrante, and being accessible to, and healing, the woman with the issue of blood (in Jewish terms, an “unclean” person): all stories, which Gnostic commentators took as allegories, illustrating and authorizing their systems. And, of course, in the third-century Gnostic Gospel of Philip, Mary Magdalene has become the symbol of Wisdom herself, and the personal consort—powerfully reminiscent of the Tyrian Helen—of the Savior who often “kissed” her (that is, imparted his spirit to her). This is all intriguing and we shall return to this echo-laden myth, but we have not as yet found out whether Simon taught any distinctive sexual practice to be passed on to others of his, or his pretended, persuasion.
What saith Irenaeus?
Now this Simon of Samaria, from whom all sorts of heresies derive their origin, formed his sect out of the following materials: Having redeemed from slavery at Tyre, a city of Phoenicia, a certain woman named Helena, he was in the habit of carrying her about with him, declaring that this woman was the first conception of his mind, the mother of all, by whom, in the beginning, he conceived in his mind [the thought] of forming angels and archangels. For this Ennoea [First Thought] leaping forth from him, and comprehending the will of her father, descended to the lower regions [of space], and generated angels and powers, by whom also he declared this word was formed. But after she had produced them, she was detained by them through motives of jealousy, because they were unwilling to be looked upon as the progeny of any other being. As to himself, they had no knowledge of him whatever; but his Ennoea was detained by those powers and angels who had been produced by her. She suffered all kinds of contumely [insulting language and treatment] from them, so that she could not return upwards to her father, but was even shut up in a human body, and for ages passed in succession from one female body to another, as from vessel to vessel. She was, for example, in that Helen on whose account the Trojan War was undertaken; for whose sake also Stesichorus was struck blind, because he had cursed her in his verses, but afterwards, repenting and writing what are called palinodes, in which he sang her praise, he was restored to sight. Thus she, passing from body to body, and suffering insults in every one of them, at last became a common prostitute; and she it was that was meant by the lost sheep. (Adversus Haereses, I.23, 2)
Well, there is no sign here of unusual sexual practices; quite the opposite in fact. Poor Helena is abused time and time again through all time by the very powers she has created.
Two things are worth noting here. First, Irenaeus uses the expression “leaping forth from him.” This suggestion of Sophia’s vigorous precociousness is developed in other Gnostic systems into a full-blown, sexually driven extroversion on Sophia’s part that, as we have indicated, tears a wound in the harmony of the Pleroma. Here, however, the creation of the angelic hierarchy is presented as Sophia’s correct comprehension of the Father’s will—not in defiance of it as in the Valentinian speculation.
Sophia is stuck in her lower creation on account of jealousy. The angels, desirous of possessing her, while neutralizing her power, and knowing not their ultimate origin, cannot cope with the idea of a superior being. No one, to my knowledge, has ever suggested that behind this myth might also lurk the covert message that the pagan gods of Rome and Greece are the jealous and sexually cruel oppressors of the monotheism of the Samaritans, with which Simon appears to identify, though apparently in a staggeringly arrogant manner. I also would suggest that we see here at work the same kind of speculation about the spiritual powers that be that we find in its purely Jewish form in the apocryphal Book of Enoch, the hottest esoteric work of the first century (the lost text of which, by the way, was brought from Ethiopia to London by Scottish explorer James Bruce in 1774, along with the Gnostic Books of Jeu).
It seems perfectly plausible to imagine that the classic Gnostic archons (rulers), the grim angels who control material existence across the spectrum of developed Gnostic mythology, were a development on the picture presented in Enoch that I show in my books, The Missing Family of Jesus and The Mysteries of John the Baptist, to explain the authentic antidemonic ministry, or operation of Jesus and the Natsarim (Watchers, Keepers, or Guardians).
In the earliest part of the Book of Enoch, which we know to have been in circulation by 37 CE, Enoch is called to publish from Dan (Caesarea Philippi) the divine intention of permanently putting in bonds the wicked, fallen Watchers, who, according to Genesis 6, had fled heaven, so enamored were they of the beauty of human women, and through whose lust, the Nephilim, or “sons of God” begat a race of giants. The Book of Enoch recounts the corruption of God’s creation to these beings, while deliverance from them constituted an apocalyptic scenario of cosmic importance. Significantly, these fallen Watchers were identified as the gods of the Gentile world; such a subversive thought can only have given confidence to Jews and Samaritans oppressed by the ruthless forces of the Roman Empire.
St. Paul’s ta stoicheia tou kosmou (“elementary principles of the universe”) in Galatians 4:3, 9 and Colossians 2:8 appears to have been equated in Ephesians 6:12 (long held erroneously to be Paul’s exclusive work) with the principalities and powers that are the enemies of Christ. The epistle of Judas (Jude v. 14, probably written by Jesus’s brother during the persecutions of Herod Agrippa in the 40s CE) correctly attributes the prophecy against the wicked Watchers to Enoch. If the historical Simon Magus did claim his Helena to have been since the beginning of time assaulted by angels, the Enochian prophetic picture appears to have been familiar to him. Besides, the basic idea is already to be found in Genesis 6, familiar to Samaritans. Helena was only the first to be subjected to sexual enslavement by the wicked powers, jealous of her spectacular sexual nature and beauty of mind, and keen to drag it down to their filthy, egotistical level.
It should be noted that such an inference would rather suggest that Simon was a kind of generous proto-feminist with sympathy for those subjected to corruption and sexual oppression in the real world. His redemption then is a magician’s transformation: he denies the reality of the world as itself a trick, a hallucination, and exposes its architects. He can practice free love because he has freed his love from the grip of the world’s corrupters. As a magician of the period, he would certainly have been familiar with Enoch’s ascription of blame for the world’s condition to Azazel, the leader of the Enochian, fallen Watchers; it was a magician’s first duty to acquaint himself with the ruling demons of the world and subject them to his power. If Simon had seriously undertaken this path, then he had reason to see himself as being above the world and as a god in human form. We should recognize the peculiar interest magicians have always taken in religion, as providing theoretical, epistemological content for practical application. If Enoch declared the wicked Watchers bound by the Father of Light’s command to Earth, then a magician could, in theory, control them, as long as his consciousness was sufficiently exalted; and this exaltation of consciousness to union with the One beyond creation (the Father) appears to be the root supporting the claims Simon’s followers (note!) made for their master.
Now, it does not take quite the amazing leap we might have thought it did to progress (if that is the right word) from the thought that the world was corrupted by evil angels who had been involved in its first creation, to asking whether these evil beings had also corrupted the books sacred to Jews; that is to say, that words attributed to God in the scriptures were the surreptitious, deceiving work of lower powers or a single dominant but lower power, so that aspects of the Jewish God as expressed in the scriptures—jealous, angry, intolerant, conquering, violent, capricious—collectively constituted an inferior, enslaving deity.
It must be remembered that Simon was a Samaritan, and Judean religious authorities reviled Samaritans. Samaritans were accused of holding to a false version of Mosaic law, of being essentially foreign (allegedly having been transplanted by Assyrian powers to what had been Israel from Cutha in what is now Iraq, and from elsewhere), for falsely believing Mount Gerizim was where God ordered his name to be established, and of having tolerated and practiced paganism. When Luke’s Jesus tells the parable indicating the Samaritan was a superior neighbor to the afflicted than the religious authorities of Judea, he would have utterly astounded most of his listeners, though Samaritans would have been chuffed.
Since we have testimony that Simon favored Mount Gerizim over Jerusalem’s Temple Mount, in conformity with the Samaritan understanding of themselves as Guardians, Keepers, and Watchers of the preexilic law (they had their own preexilic version of the Pentateuch), and that Simon may have been the leader referred to by Josephus who called for a public march to Gerizim to find the authentic, secreted Mosaic sacred vessels (including the Ark?), it would seem a considerably advantageous thought to realize Simon Magus had a stake in showing inadequacies in the precious Judean sacred manuscript tradition, significant aspects of which denigrated and excluded Samaritans.
This then is one possible origin for what became much of the Gnostic Demiurge myth whereby a deficient deity established himself with threats as the ultimate God, whose weapon was the rod of the law, but who was not the father of Jesus, the angel come to Earth as a man. This understanding helps us also to see in a flash why the issue of sex reappears consistently in a Gnostic and anti-Gnostic context. Simon’s intuition may have revealed to him that the authentic sexual impulse is the impulse of divine creation—the First Thought—a magical power that has become enslaved and perverted by men terrified of false gods.
Sex then is the essential battleground between heresy and orthodoxy, in whose historic denigration, orthodoxy saw itself triumphant as if over Azazel, the great Tempter, himself!
If it was sex that brought the wicked Watchers down from heaven, then could not sex redeemed take the good Watchers back to their eternal home?
Not if your name was Irenaeus! Despite himself, however, in reporting the beliefs of Simonians, Irenaeus’s following passage precisely confirms the interpretation of Simon’s magic I have offered above. Subtract the negative charge that infuses the statement, and it becomes a straightforward account of the metaphysical underpinning for freed love, and, if I may say so, cosmic sex—no wonder Simon had his devotees!
For this purpose, then, he [Simon] had come that he might win her first, and free her from slavery, while he conferred salvation upon men, by making himself known to them. For since the angels ruled the world badly because each one of them coveted the principal power for himself, he had come to amend matters, and had descended, transfigured, and assimilated to powers and principalities and angels, so that he might appear among men to be a man, while yet he was not a man; and that thus he was thought to have suffered in Judaea, when he had not suffered [a significant Gnostic position regarding the crucifixion]. Moreover, the prophets uttered their predictions under the inspiration of those angels who formed the world [the Jewish scriptures were flawed]; for which reason those who place their trust in him and Helena no longer regarded them, but, as being free, live as they please; for men are saved through his grace, and not on account of their own righteous actions [the law does not justify—a Pauline doctrine!]. For such deeds are not righteous in the nature of things, but by mere accident, just as those angels who made the world, have thought fit to constitute them, seeking, by means of such precepts, to bring men into bondage. On this account, he pledged himself that the world should be dissolved, and that those who are his should be freed from the rule of them who made the world. (Adversus Haereses, I.23, 4)
If my interpretation is on the right lines, we can see at once what gives the Gnostic essence its most peculiar characteristic, which so enraged orthodox minds. This was a liberationist religion conceived by a magician. Gnosis is in essence a magical religion; not content with metaphysical theory, it engages, in Simon’s instance, with metaphysical practice. It becomes a vehicle for the will, and the will to power: enabling man to rise and work his wonders, and leads to the tumultuous statement of the Hermetic Asklēpios: “A great miracle, O Asklepios, is man!”
No! says Irenaeus, leading the orthodox opposition choir; on the contrary: man is a great sinner! And none greater, it would appear, than Simon Magus!
Irenaeus was never likely to see how the tale of Simon’s offering to buy the trick of passing on the Holy Spirit by laying on of hands makes perfect sense to a magical ironist and parody-messiah, eager to know what his rival (?) Jesus had let his followers in on. (In this context, it is interesting to note in Gnostic literature how Jesus passes on his holy spirit, not through hands—the Pauline apostolic rite—but by kissing; that is, passing the breath of life from mouth to mouth.) Such a tradition is, of course, wide open to debasement of its high intention, and the tone of Irenaeus’s last word on Simon Magus makes it clear that Irenaeus thought such debasement had always been the case, rather than the equal possibility of its having been a degeneration over the five generations of followers between Simon’s heyday and Irenaeus’s time:
Thus, then, the mystic priests belonging to this sect both lead profligate lives and practise magical arts, each one to the extent of his ability. They use exorcisms and incantations. Love-potions, too, and charms, as well as those beings who are called Paredri [familiars] and Oniropompi [dream-senders], and whatever other curious arts can be had recourse to, are eagerly pressed into their service. They also have an image of Simon fashioned after the likeness of Jupiter, and another of Helena in the shape of Minerva; and these they worship. To sum up, they have a name derived from Simon, the author of these most impious doctrines, being called Simonians; and from them “knowledge, falsely so-called” received its beginning, as one may learn even from their own assertions.
Notable here is the sexual equality granted Simon and Helena and the Simonians’ own belief that the gnosis originated with them. The implication of “profligate lives” means surely that they practiced free love, as the righteous would see it, whether in or entirely outside marriage is not indicated. Sexual love was apparently very important to the mystic priests. Was it a part of their ritual? Using incantations was a theurgic means of calling on higher spiritual powers to purify ritual acts. That they practiced exorcisms, as did the apostles, also suggests a picture of Simonian priests (and priestesses?) involved in a ministry of liberating souls from lower powers, that is, from cosmic angels or possessive demons. That they did not conform to the standards of St. Paul is clear. Paul, and we may suppose Irenaeus too, regarded women as secondary and potentially dangerous and sex as something of a problem, necessitating strict marriage in order to lessen its immoral impact on the soul, for flesh and blood could not inherit eternal life. Simonians, like other Gnostics, seem to have agreed in part with this view, but they asserted also that flesh and blood infused with spiritual intelligence, united in high intention, can assist in raising the mind to mystical, divine levels, and that to transform sex from the wicked angels’ imprisoning cycle of mere lust and reproduction constituted the redemption of sex and the paradoxical sanctification of sin through love. Was it not Jesus who said, “Be ye therefore as wise as serpents, and as harmless as doves” (Matthew 10:16) and “The light of the body is the eye: if therefore thine eye be single, thy whole body is full of light” (Matthew 6:22)?
SIMON SAYS—ACCORDING TO HIPPOLYTUS
Hippolytus’s treatment of Simon Magus is very different from that of Irenaeus. In fact, he devotes fourteen meaty chapters (2–15) of book VI of his Refutation of All Heresies to expounding on the Samaritan magician’s philosophy. However, he establishes the idea that Simon’s doctrines now travel under a change of name, so he may be describing a variety of groups who share something in common with the tradition of Simon: the Carpocratians, for example. He recognizes that Simon’s legacy is basically one of magic and cites a magician called Thrasymedes as a kind of progenitor, or possibly successor (book IV of Hippolytus’s Elenchos, containing a section on Thrasymedes, has not survived). Anyway, Hippolytus’s main thrust is that the philosophy of Simon is a pinch from Pythagoreanism and pre-Socratic philosophers such as Heraclitus. However, the practice of Simonian groups he immediately condemns as orgiastic; they inspire God’s anger.
Simon attempted to deify himself, but was a “mere cheat, and full of folly.” To grasp that folly, Hippolytus cites the case of the Libyan Apsethus who tried to become a god. Having failed to convince his compatriots of his divine nature, he taught a parrot to say, “Apsethus is a god,” which the parrot spread abroad until other birds throughout North Africa parroted the phrase. All nature then seemed to testify to Apsethus’s divinity—but it was a trick, and so Hippolytus takes Simon’s following as just such a trick and a gormless parroting of something without substance. His followers are “parrots.” That’s for starters!
Hippolytus then attributes to Simon a speculative text of some interest, titled: This is the treatise of a revelation of [the] voice and name [recognizable] by means of intellectual apprehension of the Great Indefinite Power. Wherefore it will be sealed, [and] kept secret, [and] hid, [and] will repose in the habitation, at the foundation of which lies the root of all things. The element of fire is not simple; it has, asserts Simon, a double nature (this Hippolytus attributes to Aristotle’s distinction between “intelligible” and “sensible” natures). Behind the visible creation is a hidden, secret fire, protean or indefinite—in the sense also of undefined, limitless, and undefinable. It is likened to a tree. This correspondence of the fire and the tree will become more resonant as we pursue our secret sexual gnosis in due course.
[. . .] the super-celestial [fire], is a treasure, as it were a large tree, just such a one as in a dream was seen by Nabuchodonosor [Nebuchadnezzar], out of which all flesh is nourished. And the manifest portion of the fire he regards as the stem, the branches, the leaves, [and] the external rind which overlaps them. All these [appendages], he says, of the Great Tree being kindled, are made to disappear by reason of the blaze of the all-devouring fire. The fruit, however, of the tree, when it is fully grown, and has received its own form, is deposited in a granary, not (flung) into the fire. For, he says, the fruit has been produced for the purpose of being laid in the storehouse, whereas the chaff that it may be delivered over to the fire. [Now the chaff] is stem, [and is] generated not for its own sake, but for that of the fruit. (Refutatio, VI, 4)
Hippolytus does not have much to say about what seems to me to be a fairly straightforward myth of sexual alchemy, allegorizing John the Baptist’s speech in Matthew 3:7–12, where John announces that every tree that bears not fruit will be burned in the harvest fire. John goes on to explain a coming baptism of fire, later claimed by Paul to be his hand-baptism as opposed to John’s and Apollos of Alexandria’s “mere” baptism of water. This harvesting or judgment fire is the root of the Simonian fire above: the fire that, says Simon in a Kabbalah-style observation, illuminated Moses’s burning bush. When the body or rind is burned away by its all-devouring fire, what remains is the fruit of spirit, the fire invisible to the uninitiated, but existing within and sustaining all things. The lusts of the flesh are consumed by the fire in the supreme rite, revealing the essence of the Great Tree wherein God speaks to the holy. That an actual spiritual-sexual rite is being alluded to by allegorical means becomes clearer when we read what Hippolytus next has to say about Simon’s justification, a quotation from scripture:
And this, he [Simon] says, is what has been written in Scripture: “For the vineyard of the Lord of Sabaoth is the house of Israel, and the man of Judah is His beloved plant.” [Isaiah 5:7 paraphrase] If, however, the man of Judah the beloved plant, it has been proved, he says, that there is not any other tree but that man. But concerning the secretion and dissolution of this [tree], Scripture, he says, has spoken sufficiently. And as regards instruction for those who have been fashioned after the image [of him], that statement is enough which is made [in Scripture], that “all flesh is grass, and all the glory of flesh, as it were, a flower of grass. The grass withereth, and its flower falleth; but the word of the Lord abideth forever.” The word of the Lord, he says, is that word which is produced in the mouth, and a Logos, but nowhere else exists there a place of generation. (Refutatio, VI, 5)
The last cryptic sentence of the quotation above refers, we can be fairly sure, to the vagina of the priestess, understood as the mystic yoni: the place of generation where the Logos, that is the Word, becomes flesh and vice versa. The body dissolves in the fire of supernal orgasm, bringing forth the pure fire secreted within the fire: God. That the plant is expressed in the phallus is clear enough. The secret is contained in the words “the secretion and dissolution of this [tree].” At the height of passionate fire, the plant withers, but its engendered virtue “liveth forever,” that is, the seed partakes of the substance of eternity: the new seed also has within it the hidden fire. This is a formula for the magical energizing of sexual fluids. Now perhaps we can understand better the famous injunction in the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas that If you do not bring forth what is within you, what is within you will destroy you: spiritual orgasm is salvation; suppression of the seed is death. That plant that does not bring forth fruit unto the Lord will be swallowed up in its external fire. One can only wonder if John the Baptist, historically, had any inkling of such allegorical conceptions. According to Simonian tradition, he did, for John was the herald of the harvest, the master of ceremonies at the Hermetic conflagration!
Hippolytus doesn’t “get” any of this at all. He seems to think he’s reading a treatise on philosophy like Heraclitus’s speculations on the origin of the universe (created from primal Fire). Hippolytus next throws in Empedocles as the source for the speculation contained in another work attributed to Simon: the Apophasis Megalē, or “Great Announcement.”
Hippolytus outlines a confused account of the existence of six roots—the tree theme again—made from the fire in pairs, these root-pairs being Mind and Intelligence, Voice and Name, Ratiocination and Reflection: all aspects of consciousness, which, when activated together, creating awareness, generate progeny: the Logos or Son “without whom was nothing made” (John 1.3). The child of the magic rite is its willed intention made manifest.
Within the six roots, the indefinite power exists in potential, but not in actuality. The magic is necessary to turn potential into realization. The indefinite power is identified with Simon’s followers’ soubriquet for their erect master: “He who stood, stands and will stand.” What he can stand is the fire, the purging, the judgment, or testing that comes to all created things: the fire within. Interestingly, the Mandaeans believe their great prophet, John the Baptist, could not be burned by fire; Simonians claimed precisely the same for their master.
The scriptural source for the standing motif appears to be Malachi 3:1–2, where Malachi (the “messenger”) declares the coming of God’s messenger who will purge the sons of Levi: “But who may abide the day of his coming? And who shall stand when he [the messenger] appeareth?” The quotation is key to Mark’s gospel’s introduction to the message of John the Baptist. Who can “stand” when the messenger appeareth?
Interestingly, the Simonian text then suggests that this name can apply to all people who realize in themselves the potential of the six roots. If, however, the indefinite power of the six roots remains only in potential, the six roots then fail to produce an image, and the man vanishes. This vanishing is compared to loss of intellectual ability in senility. The six roots offer the capacity to take on an art, whereby “a light of existent things” is produced, but if the capacity does not take unto itself an art, “unskillfulness and ignorance” result, and as with the power becoming nonexistent from nonexpression, the capacity dies with the expiring man. In this case, the man has not stood and therefore will not stand. This is a fine reworking of the spiritual message of the parable of the sower and, on a more prosaic, banal level, the “use it or lose it” ethic. Hippolytus doesn’t grasp the humor of it at all.
The hidden fire needs to seize its means of expression, and therefore, one can see what Hippolytus apparently cannot, that this Simonian tradition was advocating a form of sexual magic as the means of realizing the potential inner man, awakening abilities dormant in the soul and firing up the great hidden being of man to his proper dimensions: become the genius, or die! This dovetails with Jesus’s saying that “For whoever has, to him more shall be given; and whoever does not have, even what he has shall be taken away from him,” and indeed explains what otherwise might seem like a merely vindictive warning (Mark 4:25; cf. Matthew 25:29).
Sexual imagery is even more explicit in the further adumbration of the Simonian system. Of the seven powers (the six root-pairs, plus the “indefinite power”), the first pair, Mind and Intelligence, are called Heaven and Earth, where Heaven is masculine, looking down from above on his partner, the Earth, who receives from above the “rational fruits, akin to the Earth.” It seems the “missionary position” has Gnostic significance. (We may also think of Isis, born of the coitus of Geb—the Earth—and Nuit—the starry heavens above.)
The Logos, says the Great Announcement, is always looking to what Mind and Intelligence generate from the intercourse of heaven and Earth, and as the seventh power (he who stands), exclaims: “Hear, O Heaven, and give ear, O Earth, because the Lord has spoken. I have brought forth children, and exalted them; and these have rejected me.”
Voice and Name correspond to Sun and Moon, while Ratiocination and Reflection correspond to Air and Water, all significant principles in Egyptian alchemy. These are linked to the Simonian allegorical treatment of the six days of creation in Genesis, considered as Moses’s composition; with the creation presented as a kind of alchemical operation.
Thus, there were three days before sun and moon appeared, the three days standing for Mind and Intelligence (Heaven and Earth) plus the seventh power (which we might call the indefinable ever-existent). According to the Simonian text, this seventh power is that referred to by Moses in Genesis 1:2 thus: “And the spirit of God was wafted over the water.” We can see that the Simonians have linked the magical sexual generation to the primal creation of the heavens and the Earth. That too involved the actualization of the indefinite power or spirit of God functioning as: “an image from an incorruptible form that alone reduces all things to order.”
This “image” is very close to the logos of Stoicism, that philosophy founded by Cypriot Zeno of Citium in the second century BCE: logos being the intelligible formative and distinguishing principle in all things. The Jewish philosopher Philo of Alexandria (ca. 20 BCE–50 CE), Simon’s older contemporary, identified the Stoic logos with Sophia (Greek for the Hebrew Hokhmah = Wisdom).
Genesis 1:26 has God (Elohim = Gods) saying: “Let us create man in our image.” The first-person plural us was taken in first and second century Alexandria to suggest the Logos-Sophia’s being coinstrumental in man’s creation, and according to Philo (de Opficio Mundi 74–75), it was in fact the shared nature of the work that accounted for man’s imperfection! Man was “good” but not absolutely perfect or, in Simonian terms, not fully actualized; he did not have the gnosis automatically.
The Simonian text now links powerfully the creation of man with the warning of judgment-fire that permanently condemns the potential but not actualized world:
[. . .] the Deity, he says, proceeded to form man, taking clay from the earth. And He formed him not uncompounded, but twofold, according to [His own] image and likeness. Now the image is the Spirit that is wafted over the water; and whosoever is not fashioned into a figure of this will perish with the world, inasmuch as he continues only potentially, and does exist actually. This, he says, is what has been spoken, “that we should not be condemned with the world.” If one, however, be made into the figure of (the Spirit), and be generated from an indivisible point, as it has been written in the Announcement, [such a one, albeit] small, will become great. But what is great will continue unto infinite and unalterable duration, as being that which no longer is subject to the conditions of a generated entity. (Refutatio, VI, 9)
The Great Announcement next asks where God formed man. Answer: in paradise. The Simonian text jumps to interpret paradise as referring to the womb, offering the following text as suggestive proof: “I am He who forms thee in thy mother’s womb” (Isaiah 44:24; cf. Psalm 139:13; Jeremiah 1:5). Well wide of the mark, Hippolytus’s concern is that this interpretation not only forces the text, but that it is not a properly exact quotation either! Clever Hippolytus continually misses the point that the text is offering spiritual allegories for rituals of sacramentalized sex, possibly to the end of producing children made in the image of the seventh power: such children being either actual and sensible or, more likely perhaps, willed intentions born into the world of cause and effect from male and female intercourse to accomplish the magician’s (the awakened man’s) will.
The will is accomplished through the child’s acting upon the universal potential fire with actualizing, superior occult fire. This is, that fire stolen by the lower angels from heaven and abused by the ignorant in this world, as Helena was abused, while never being truly possessed, until her father and consort returned to her. This is the Simonian conception of Holy Spirit. Until one understands the occult meaning of this mythos, the signs on the gates of the Gnostic garden will forever be misunderstood, as indeed they appear to have been by most scholars in the field, with some few notable exceptions, as we shall see.
Chapter 10 of book VI of the Refutatio is a little more difficult, especially on account of the manner in which Hippolytus has expressed his Simonian source, but it is not too hard to see behind his garbling a coded account of the magical value of spiritually directed sex and sexual fluids.
The Simonian text takes the rivers that flow from Eden (the womb) as signifying the four senses pertaining to the child in the womb: sight, taste, smell, and touch. Four of the five Mosaic books are said to refer to these senses. Genesis pertains to vision, for vision is necessary to acquire first knowledge of the universe. Exodus pertains to taste. To go beyond vision of the universe, which even the Gentiles have, it is necessary to be liberated, signified by crossing the Red Sea, which the text indicates as blood. To tread that liquid path leads to knowledge, but is nonetheless a path that first entails entering the wilderness, tasted through bitter water reflecting the bitterness of the human existential lot, without knowledge, that is. However, Moses sweetens the bitter water by means of the Logos (Moses strikes the rock with his magic rod in the wilderness generating trickling nourishment for the thirsty; Exodus 17:5–7), whereafter this knowledge (gnosis) is expressed by Homer: “Dark at the root, like milk, the flower, Gods call it ‘Moly,’ and hard for mortal men to dig, but power divine is boundless.”
The Exodus is an escape from the values of this world, the world of dark powers. The symbolism seems fairly plain to this author: escape requires a transgressive leap. First, the menstrual blood should be drunk as a reminder of what has been left behind: the fruitless existence. The passing of sacramentalized semen to the otherwise infertile womb generates, through mixture with vaginal fluids, a milk that is the flower of the primal, divine generation whose boundless power divine constitutes the elixir of the sect. It is as ironic as it is remarkable that Hippolytus has inadvertently passed on to the profane the secrets of sexual magic without ever realizing it!
That the elixir was for consumption is indicated in the reference to “moly,” a magical herb. In book 10 of Homer’s Odyssey, Hermes offers it to Odysseus as an antidote to Circe’s magic: the bewitchment of the world as Simonians would see it. Believed to have grown from the blood of the Gigante killed on the Isle of Kirke, the plant has a white flower. Helios (the Sun) was Kirke’s ally in defeating the Gigante. The plant’s name was believed to come from the hardness (Greek: malos) of the combat: the fruit of the bitter phase in Simonian understanding. These details further suggest the vigorous sacrificial sexual connotations significant to Simonians, as do Homer’s words describing it: “The root was black, while the flower was as white as milk; the gods call it Moly, Dangerous for a mortal man to pluck from the soil, but not for the deathless gods. All lies within their power.”
These “deathless gods” then are the Simonians who have actualized their potential fire. Awakening to this power is the subject of the Great Announcement and the reason, according to the Simonians, for Simon’s Samaritan title as the Great Power of God. That great power exists in potentia in every man and woman. Humanity will escape the bonds of Earth!
Simonian interpretations of the nature of the books of Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy (also attributed to Moses) follow the sexually symbolic lines of Genesis and Exodus. Thus, since Leviticus deals with sacrifices—giving of self in orgasm—it corresponds to the child’s sense of smell. The book of Numbers obscurely correlates with the sense of taste to numerical arrangement, “where the discourse is operative.” Since Deuteronomy is a summary of the preceding four pentateuchal books in terms of law, Simonians regard it as corresponding to the sense of touch: “testing what is rough or warm or clammy.”
What exists in humankind that is of God (unbegotten), being only potential, not actual, requires then external instruction, which received, can make the bitter sweet and turn swords into plowshares. Quoting John the Baptist: “Every tree, he says, which does not produce good fruit, is hewn down and cast into the fire” (Matthew 3:10). Correct sexual knowledge ensures the production of the “good fruit,” and the generation of those that “can stand and will stand”: generations other Gnostics will call the generation of Seth, for Seth was Adam’s child perfected, after the disaster of Cain and Abel.
We have then in the Simonian Great Announcement that which has been rendered obscure in the Valentinian and Sethian traditions, both by heresiologists and contemporary scholarship apt to see spiritual philosophy and primitive psychology about knowing oneself, where in fact sexual symbolism and actualized spiritual magic is the intention:
Wherefore the desire after mutable generation is denominated to be inflamed. For when the fire is one, it admits of two conversions. For, he [Simon] says, blood in the man being both warm and yellow, is converted as a figured flame into seed; but in the woman this same blood is converted into milk. And the conversion of the male becomes generation, but the conversion of the female nourishment for the foetus. This, he says, is “the flaming sword, which turned to guard the way of the tree of life.” For the blood is converted into seed and milk, and this power becomes mother and father—father of those things that are in process of generation, and the augmentation of those things that are being nourished; [and this power is] without further want, [and] self-sufficient. And, he says, the tree of life is guarded, as we have stated, by the brandished flaming sword. And it is the seventh power, that which [is produced] from itself, [and] which contains all [powers, and] which reposes in the six powers. For if the flaming sword be not brandished, that good tree will be destroyed and perish. If, however, these be converted into seed and milk, the principle that resides in these potentially, and is in possession of a proper position, in which is evolved a principle of souls, [such a principle] beginning, as it were, from a very small spark, will be altogether magnified, and will increase and become a power indefinite [and] unalterable, [equal and similar] to an unalterable age, which no longer passes into the indefinite age. (Refutatio, VI, 12)
One aim of Simonian practices appears then to have been the generation of “supermen” and, we may assume, “superwomen,” or rather the androgynous super-being. Such would certainly account for the arrogance heresiologists persistently detect among the heretics, somewhat reminiscent of the image of the spoiled child.
Hippolytus quotes from Simon’s Revelation to the effect that the primal power is hermaphroditic, though in reality one, as the pair Power and Intelligence is really one. However, in the world of duality, at a remove from the primal source, what is one appears as two.
The dynamic of an Earth that is feminine, intelligent, and that receives power from above is a creative dynamic, a living tree. We see here in the second century the essential binary dynamic of Jacob Böhme’s seventeenth-century theosophical system and the historical dialectic of Hegel in essence. Manifestation of the one requires duality: each opposite longing for the other, so to speak. Therefore, to approach sexual congress in full knowledge of the hermaphroditic nature of the power that “stood, stands, and will stand” is to participate actively in the cosmic process, expressing it sacramentally, at the same time as we rise in knowledge above it.
Students of esotericism will observe the correspondence between the Simonian fire and the nineteenth-century concept of the fluidic “astral light” of Eliphas Lévi (1810–1875) on which the will of the magician may be impressed, a magical conception derived in part from Franz Anton Mesmer (1734–1815) and his “animal magnetism”: the supposed invisible medium through which magical acts of healing may be accomplished. Simon’s divine fire is an occult energy. Had a historical Simon observed an apostle transferring Holy Spirit by hand, he would have seen the activity in this light as a matter of course, as an occult ability whose secret could be purchased and mastered.
The Simon of the Revelation is a theosopher, after all. The sexual doctrines manifest the philosophy: “This, [therefore] is Mind [subsisting] in Intelligence; and these are separable one from the other, [though both taken together] are one, [and] are discovered in a state of duality” (Refutatio, VI, 13). When we think in terms of our created selves, we are in a state of duality. When through activation of the potential in the fire we may see that the duality is in fact one, for the mystic has joined the one, being now one with the hidden fire that is God. This monadic-hermaphroditic identity is apparently transpersonal, and on this basis, the otherwise ludicrous claim of Simon to have been also the one who suffered in Judea—and of Helen to have been Helen of Troy—makes metaphysical sense to the initiated, or as John Lennon perhaps expressed something of the kind in his transpersonalized work, “I Am the Walrus,” based on LSD-induced visions in 1967: “I am he as you are he as you are me and we are all together.”
Hippolytus recounts Simonian arguments for the meaning of Helen in chapter 14 of the Refutatio. They are far from uninteresting. Manifesting divine intelligence above the norm of the lower world, Helen of Troy caused a war by virtue of the opposite sides desiring to possess what was above them. The poet Stesichorus loses his eyesight when he denigrates “the Lady” in his verses, but recovers his vision when he sings her praises! This is a fine allegory of what it is a poet should see to be a poet, though it is wasted on Hippolytus, who thinks he’s dealing with banal claims of historical accuracy. Simon seems to be aware of a metahistorical viewpoint that would return with William Blake and Louis-Claude de St. Martin and his associates and Martinist followers in the eighteenth century and beyond. There is nothing new under the sun!
Hippolytus calls Simon a “filthy fellow,” who, rather than having redeemed the girl from bondage, having glimpsed her on the roof of the Tyrian brothel, was simply so enamoured he bought her and “enjoyed her person.” His stories were, according to Hippolytus, concocted to cover his shame regarding his obsession with her. It is a pity that we do not have Helen’s own testimony.
Hippolytus now ascribes Simonian practices to an imitation of Simon’s lust. They “irrationally allege the necessity of promiscuous intercourse,” and say: “All earth is earth, and there is no difference where anyone sows, provided he does sow.” They congratulate one another, says Hippolytus, on their “indiscriminate intercourse,” using expressions like holy of holies (presumably for the womb) and sanctify one another, all of which surely proves that they were practicing sacramental sex.
They claim Simon’s redemption of Helen is the archetype for all human redemption from the powers of the lower realm. Rather like Jean-Luc Godard’s use of the image and metaphor of prostitution in his films, Simon apparently had concluded that the world was one great brothel where flesh and innocence are defiled, bought, and sold, profited from and disposed of.
Chapter 14 of the Refutatio makes clear what I have suggested earlier, namely, the transpersonalizing nature of the Simonian redemption myth. For here we see how the Simonian gnosis can be, and in fact is, transferred practically entire—no pun intended—to the Christian kerygma to generate the numerous peculiarities of Christian gnosis that so enraged the heresiologists:
“And [Jesus], by having redeemed Helen in this way,” [Simon says] “has afforded salvation to men through his own peculiar intelligence. For inasmuch as the angels, by reason of their lust for pre-eminence, improperly managed the world, [Jesus Christ] being transformed, and being assimilated to the rulers and powers and angels, came for the restoration [of things]. And so [it was that Jesus] appeared as man, when in reality he was not a man. And [so it was] that likewise he suffered—though not actually undergoing suffering, but appearing to the Jews to do so—in Judea as ‘Son,’ and in Samaria as ‘Father,’ and among the rest of the Gentiles as ‘Holy Spirit.’” And [Simon alleges] that Jesus tolerated being styled by whichever name [of the three just mentioned] men might wish to call him [amusing early support for the concept of the trinity!]. “And that the prophets, deriving their inspiration from the world-making angels, uttered predictions” [concerning him]. Wherefore, [Simon said,] that towards these [prophets] those felt no concern up to the present, who believe on Simon and Helen, and that they do whatsoever they please, as persons free; for they allege that they are saved by grace. For that there is no reason for punishment, even though one shall act wickedly; for such a one is not wicked by nature, but by enactment. “For the angels who created the world made,” he says, “whatever enactments they pleased,” thinking by such [legislative] words to enslave those who listened to them. But, again, they speak of a dissolution of the world, for the redemption of his own particular adherents.
Hippolytus is in no doubt that the whole cult is a massive pretense, for they are driven by self-centered lust and are covering it up with a lot of philosophical claptrap, and are deceiving themselves if they think they are redeemed and free of the laws of the world to do as they wish with whomsoever they please.
According to Hippolytus’s last word on the sorcerer, Simon’s end came in opposition to Peter, when, making his last boast, Simon in Rome asked his disciples to bury him in the earth, wherefrom after three days he would emerge triumphant. But, according to Hippolytus, he did not emerge “for he was not the Christ.” It is somewhat difficult to imagine he would have had a significant following had such an event occurred as reported. What happened to the story of Simon’s last flight?
Hippolytus concludes by saying that Valentinus received from Simonian discourse “the starting-point for his own doctrine,” indicating that Valentinus’s more complex aeon theory was an obvious extension of Simon’s six-root speculation, summed up by the heresiologist as a “tissue of legends.” Hippolytus may have thought he had refuted Simonian views thoroughly, but they refused to lie down.
EPIPHANIUS ON SIMON
Over a century and a half after Hippolytus, Epiphanius felt it incumbent upon himself to attack Simon Magus and his followers’ “pornography” (Panarion, I, part 5, section 23). Encratite in outlook, Epiphanius refers to intercourse as “the obscene act.” Epiphanius has little substantial to add to the accounts of Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, and Hippolytus, though in Book I, part 21, section 2, 2:4, he introduces into the Simonian myth’s dramatis personae the titles Prunicus and Barbelo (or Barbero). Prunicus is associated by Epiphanius with the Holy Spirit and thus with Helen. Epiphanius says other sects call Prunicus Barbelo. However, in implying that Barbelo is another name for Helen, he may be mistaken, for in other, mostly Sethian, Gnostic texts, while Barbelo is also identified with the Father’s First Thought (Ennoea), she does not descend to experience travails, as do Helen and Sophia in Simonian and Valentinian myths, respectively.
Simon told a fairy tale about this, and said that the power kept transforming her appearance on her way down from on high, and that the poets had spoken of this in allegories. For these angels went to war over the power from on high—they call her Prunicus, but she is called Barbero or Barbelo by other sects—because she displayed her beauty and drove them wild, and was sent for this purpose, to despoil the archons who had made this world. She has suffered no harm, but she brought them to the point of slaughtering each other from the lust for her that she aroused in them. (Panarion, I, part 21, section 2, 2:5, my italics)
Precisely what the curious title Prunicus means we shall investigate in chapter 10, though Epiphanius has no hesitation in taking the honorific to mean “lascivious one,” and having found it in connection with Helen the whore, as displayed by her tramp, finds all he needs to confirm that ascription.
Epiphanius offers the idea that Helen/Prunicus has to suffer the intercourse of the “archons who made the world” through many baleful incarnations so that in encouraging them to kill or be killed through their jealousy of her—Epiphanius sees no problem with the idea of angels slaughtering one another—the archons would suffer diminution by loss of blood. “Then, by gathering the power again, she would be able to ascend to heaven once more” (Panarion, 1, part 21, section 2, 2:6). While this would contradict the idea that Simon came to save her, the emphasis seems to be on a doctrine that Epiphanius is garbling, either deliberately or through ignorance of it. What is in the blood of the archons that could deliver her? Well, if we look at Sethian and Valentinian Gnostic variants, we shall find it commonly held that the archons inherited seed of pneuma (spirit) from their original source, though deficient in quantity or through admixture, and that this has been passed on in the process of human evolution under archontic control. However, in the context of Gnostic groups referred to by Epiphanius elsewhere, especially the Borborites as he calls them, or “filthy people,” we may imagine that this blood of the archons is linked to the potential seed, that is, sperm in believers that requires gathering up like the lost sheep; for we may recall that among the earliest titles for Helen was that of the lost sheep whom Simon came to gather up as a type for the redemption of all in the grip of the archons. Thus the Simonian discourse on gathering the “blood of the archons” is probably informed by radical interpretation of the critical phrase “without the shedding of blood [read semen] there is no remission” (Hebrews 9:22; cf. Leviticus 17:11) where shedding of blood effects atonement: “For the life of the creature is in the blood, and I have given it to you to make atonement for yourselves on the altar; it is the blood that makes atonement for one’s life.” Sexual magic effected spiritual atonement: the “healing of the passions of matter.”
Our interpretation of Hippolytus’s refutations of Simonian doctrine in the Great Announcement attributed to him by devotees is confirmed precisely, though wholly negatively as we should expect, by Epiphanius:
He instituted mysteries consisting of dirt and, to put it politely, the fluids that flow from bodies—men’s through the seminal emission and women’s through the regular menses, which are gathered as mysteries by a most indecent method of collection.
And he said that these are mysteries of life and the fullest knowledge. But for anyone to whom God has given understanding, knowledge is above all a matter of regarding these things as abomination instead, and death rather than life. (Panarion, I, part 21, section 2, 4:1, 4:2)
Scholarship is not united on the question of whether Simon Magus was the first Gnostic. It does seem like a convenient assertion from the orthodox point of view, for Simon was condemned by Peter from the start, according to Acts (8:9–24), and as Epiphanius protests: How could Peter condemn anything unless it was not good? How, asks Epiphanius, could the world not belong to a good God, when “all the good have been chosen from it”? How can the law and the words of the prophets be perverted utterances of archons when they testify about Christ and forbid wrongdoing?
Epiphanius is in no doubt that all the essential ideas to be found among all the Gnostic-type heretical groups are found in Simon’s first, including the central and most damning one:
This world has been defectively constructed by wicked principalities and authorities, he [Simon] says. But he teaches that there is a decay and destruction of flesh, and a purification only of souls—and of these [only] if they are established in their initiation through his erroneous “knowledge.” And thus the imposture of the so-called Gnostics begins. (Panarion, I, part 21, section 2, 4:4)
However, Epiphanius is looking back with hindsight. We cannot be certain that Simonian ideas themselves did not emerge as a Gnosticizing of a core tradition around Simon concerning magic, Helen, and a possibly radical initiatory doctrine. Irenaeus, of course, knows Simon as the first heretical deceiver of Jesus’s early followers, but he knows it from limited sources (Acts and Justin Martyr) and seems unaware of the complexities familiar to Hippolytus some forty or so years later. Furthermore, Simon plays no part in any text of the Nag Hammadi corpus, save a brief reference to Simonians in the Encratite Testimony of Truth (dated ca. 190–300 CE), which is critical of Simonians, though nonetheless gives us the snippet that while permitted pleasures, they married and had children, evincing carnal procreation the text regards as a reign of horror whose hold over the true Gnostic has passed (Nag Hammadi Library, Testimony of Truth, IX, 3, 58).
However, it remains attractive to see the other Gnostic groups sprouting forth from a Simonian source, because the logic of mythological development favors the simpler presentation first, after which come the deviations, disagreements, caveats, and additions, depending on the genius or folly of the heresiarch concerned. Something attracted the author or authors of the Great Announcement and Simon’s Revelation to the mixed stories circulating about the Samaritan magus, unless we take the texts at their word and see Simon not as a myth-starter and more of a myth-initiator and philosophical expounder.
We should not be entirely surprised if subsequent anti-orthodox figures deliberately obscured the “beastly filth” (Epiphanius’s phrase) of Simon as the real source of their speculations; such would be typical of occult history: when the once-radical aims at respectability, he cleans up his past and obscures the genius or geniuses who took the real risks. If Simon’s reputation had become unenviable, or the behavior of his followers was held to be embarrassing, then would-be founders of Gnostic schools would doubtless favor textual material believed to have apostolic authority, especially if apocryphal and easily subject to retelling and reinterpretation. Gnostics counted it a virtue to create their own spiritual works, prizing the living Jesus over episcopal text control, as Elaine Pagels has repeated many times.
For Epiphanius, as for Irenaeus, Simon is the one who dreamt up the story of angels making the Earth, before they turned completely insane with lust for Helen—itself a kind of midrash on Genesis 6:1–7, where God regrets his creation after the sons of God lusted after human women—but that in Simonian tradition, what they lusted over was truly above them, but they could not see it. Is there not here just a hint of Jesus’s traditionally tolerant attitude to those condemned by the righteous as prostitutes?
It is difficult not to wonder if the authentic Simon regarded all hypocrites as evil Watchers (in the Enochian mold) and was particularly mindful of the Herodian priesthood dominating Jerusalem with its alien cult, and that Simon, understanding the magical power of imagination, was simply telling the truth when he said he created the world in which Helen was saved from the grip of the wicked. For his mythos, with which he held his followers spellbound, was in truth his creation, and if he had redeemed Helen, could not his followers become free of the imagined power structure of others too? Could they not redraw the world?
This is speculation, of course, but there seems to be a kernel of authenticity in the jokes that Epiphanius repeats, attributed to Simon:
And again, of the lawful wedlock which Simon himself shamefully corrupts to make provision for his own lust, he says elsewhere, “Those whom God hath joined together, let not man put asunder.” (Panarion, I, part 21, section 2, 5:8)
This is not only an apt description of the spiritual nature of a conjugal union, whether inside or outside marriage, dedicated to realizing the hidden God, but serves as the kind of riposte an intelligent, witty man might offer a Pharisee who condemned as unclean a man who dwelled with an unmarried whore and who dared call himself free.
But it was perhaps the sex that condemned Simon, above all. There remains within the earliest traditions concerning him a horror of mixing sex with the Holy Spirit. This horror remains to this day, and to feel it and think it is to join one’s mind to that of Epiphanius who condemned Simon’s alleged doctrines as “charlatan’s drivel” and who regarded even lawful Christian marriage as beneath the standard required within the kingdom of heaven:
And many other arguments can be found in opposition to the charlatan’s drivel. How can unnatural acts be life-giving, unless perhaps it is the will of demons, when the Lord himself in the Gospel speaks in reply to those who told him, “If the case of the man and wife be so, it is not good to marry?” And he said to them, “All men cannot receive this, for there be eunuchs which have made themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven’s sake” [Matthew 19:10–12]—and proved that true abstention from marriage is the gift of the kingdom of heaven. (Panarion, I, part 21, section 2, 5:7)
In Epiphanius’s many healings of the poison of Simon, he never mentions one obvious contradiction in the Simonian doctrine as he spits it out. If the angels have created such a deficient world, how is it that sacramental sex has the capacity to awaken the potential, undefinable God-Logos-Fire? Simon, unlike Epiphanius and, as far as we can tell, a significant amount of the literary gnosis available to Pachomian monasteries, does not reject the body altogether, in this life. It was Paul who declared that flesh and blood could not inherit eternal life, yet Epiphanius condemns Simon for believing the same thing with respect to not believing in the body’s resurrection. Epiphanius is an Encratite, rejecting the body and looking down on procreation. What is the practical difference between believing the creation is God’s, but that the body is corrupt, and believing the creation is deficient, but that the body can contribute to the spirit’s redemption?
It was probably converted German Catholic theologian Erik Peterson (1890–1960) who pioneered the view that Encratism could be distinguished from Gnosticism (see the brilliant analysis of Gilles Quispel’s A Study of Encratism). Before Peterson, it was common to share Isaac Newton’s assumption that body hatred (and especially female body hatred) coincided precisely with the creation-rejection of Gnostics, even though it left the question of how Encratite-oriented bishops like Epiphanius could hate Gnostics so much in the fourth century, berating them violently for not hating the flesh and renouncing procreation and its means.
We know Irenaeus condemned the Encratites circa 180 for their rejection of meat, wine, and marriage, but we get more information about them from the third book of Clement of Alexandria’s Strōmateis (ca. 200 CE). Encratite origins appear to be Jewish-Christian, located principally in modern-day Syria (northern Mesopotamia) and Alexandria. The immanent messianic kingdom precluded marriage. Jesus should be followed and imitated; he was poor and did not marry. The eating of the forbidden fruit of copulation had resulted in death (post coitum triste); this was the fruit that contained bitterness. This idea may have been important to the Simonian bitter water of the womb’s spiritually infertile “wilderness” discussed earlier; Simonian Gnostics had to overcome the Fall’s effect, whereby sex had become fatal and escape from bondage was only achieved by correct understanding of the four rivers that flowed from Eden.
Encratite priorities are visible in the Gospel of Thomas (a sayings collection probably compiled in Edessa, ca. 140) and the Gospel of the Egyptians (Jewish Christian and assuredly Encratite) and very strongly in the Nag Hammadi Book of Thomas the Contender, thought by professor of religion John D. Turner to have been composed in Syrian Edessa’s Thomas-venerating Encratite culture in the mid-third century.
In the Gospel of the Egyptians, thanatos (death) is the consequence of eros (sexual love). In Encratism, the redeemed must trample on the “garment of shame” (the body); there can be no more male or female: sexual identity is no identity. No more children; no more death. Cease lusting; cease suffering. Desire creates illusion (the world). How different is the Simonian tradition of venerating the images of the Lord (Simon) and the Lady (Helena) equally, from line 114 of the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas, where to enter the kingdom of heaven the female must become male! When Simon redeems his lost First Thought, he does not reject her femininity.
Encratism was not indigenous to Gnosticism, but it clearly became involved with it, leading to great confusion when trying to assess Gnostic philosophy as a whole. My own view, which I state here for the first time, is that Gnostic thought underwent considerable change in the third and fourth centuries when the Encratite position found ingress to congenial Gnostic settings that had already rejected the fleshly Jesus and the physical resurrection. The libido, if you like, departed much of the movement, perhaps leaving Valentinians struggling to make sense of their traditional openness to spiritually transforming romantic love, a struggle arguably evinced in the Gospel of Philip. Radical Sethians and Simonians, once central, perhaps now moved to the fringes, were isolated by their refusal to abandon the pleasure principle and out of tune with the changing times. It may be that the antilibertine polemic of the heresiologists had taken root and generated a reactive realignment with the desire for a historically more authentic, and perhaps even intellectually fashionable, movement in the wake of protracted political uncertainty.
If there is one good argument for holding the Simonian tradition as the first genuinely Gnostic reinterpretation of the logic of salvation, it may just lie here, in the suggestion of a tacit resistance to a growing Encratism that would not only swallow the Catholic Church virtually whole by the end of the fourth century, but would transform much of the third- and fourth-century literature of the gnosis as well, if the surviving works of the Nag Hammadi Library are anything to go by.
Simon, being a magician, not a theologian, did not take the world as read; he seems to have believed in the positive approach to transforming the existential realities through the power of imagination to act upon the sleeping, unseen potential within the human being. He changed his reality, creating his own universe, and told the detritus where it could stick itself. Arguably, by contrast, third-century gnosis, shorn of magic, stands as spiritual psychology, which may explain the appeal of Valentinianism today to Christians floundering with modernism and reacting against the ancient assumption that Christianity is fundamentally ascetic, that world rejection characterizes the Christian saint. For in Valentinian gnosis, world rejection is essentially a spiritual, not a physical, labor as with the orthodox Encratistic tradition, which for much of the post-World War II world spells nothing but an unwelcome, colorless agony of soul and a protracted embrace of suffering. The Gospel of Philip gives us the post-1960s spiritual message: “He [Christ] came crucifying the world.” The essential job has been done; one does not have to crucify oneself. The cross becomes conceptual, wiped clean of blood. Nobody who accepts cremation truly believes in the resurrection of the body.