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Commentary. The Sethian Gnosis
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COMMENTARY
This is evidently the Logos—the God from the Egg, and the God from the Rock; for the Primal Firmament was symbolised as Rock, as Adamant; just as in physical nature, the life-spark appears from the mineral kingdom.
The Logos presides in highest heaven, in the ineffable spaces, whence He sends out His rays upon the Æ on, that Bound of Bounds which is itself Boundless. For the Egg may be thought of as the Boundary of some special universe or system; whereas the Æ on is the Boundary of all universes.
The information given in this quotation purports to be the Orphic tradition of cosmogony; with this cosmogony all Hellenistic theologians would be familiar, and therefore we are not surprised to find many points of contact between it and the general ideas in our “Pœ mandres” cosmogenesis, which, though doubtless having an original nucleus of Egyptian tradition in it, is nevertheless strongly overworked by minds that were also saturated with the mingled traditions of Plato, Pythagoras, and Orpheus.
Indeed, both “Plato” and “Pythagoras, ” on their mystical side, are strongly tinged with “Orpheus. ” Now, Orphicism was the revival of pre-Hesiodic Orphism initiated by Onomacritus under the Peisistratidæ. Original Orphism was, in my opinion, a blend of Hellenic Bardic lore with “Chaldæ an” elements. It is not surprising, therefore, that when the “Books of the Chaldæ ans, ” collected for the Alexandrian Library, were
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turned into Greek, great interest should have been taken in them by Hellenistic scholars, who found therein a confirmation of the Greek Wisdom of Orpheus, little suspecting that that Wisdom was in origin partially from the same source.
THE SETHIAN GNOSIS
In illustration of this Chaldæ o-Orphic symbolical cosmogony as “philosophised” in a Hellenistic Gnostic environment, we will quote from a system ascribed by Hippolytus to the Sē thians (a name indicating an Egyptian environment), and brought by him into the closest connection with those whom he calls the Naassenes—that is to say, with what he considers to be one of the earliest forms of the Christian Gnosis, but which, as we have shown, is a form of the pre-Christian Gnosis overworked in Christian terms about the middle of the second century. Of these Sē thians, Hippolytus 1 tells us as follows:
“They think that there are Three Principles 2 of the universals having certain definite boundaries, and yet that each of these Principles possesses boundless potentialities.
“Now, the Essences of these Principles (he says) are Light and Darkness; and in the midst of these is pure Spirit.
“The Spirit, however, that is set in the midst of the Darkness that is below and of the Light that is above, is not a spirit [or breath] like a blast of wind or some light breeze that can be felt; but is as it were the delicate scent of unguent or of incense compounded and
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prepared, —a force of fragrance that travels with a motion so rapid as to be quite inconceivable and far beyond the power of words to express.
“Now, since Light is above and Darkness below, and Spirit in some such way as I have said between them, —the Nature of the Light is that it shines forth from above, like a ray of the sun, into the Darkness beneath, while that of the fragrance of the Spirit, which has the middle rank, is, contrary wise, that it extends itself and is carried in every direction; just as in the case of incense on a fire, we see its fragrance carried in every direction.
“And such being the Power of the triply divided [Principles], the combined Power of the Spirit and Light descends into the Darkness which is set beneath them.
“And the Darkness is an awesome Water into which the Light together with the Spirit is drawn down and transferred.
“The Darkness, however, is not without understanding, but quite intelligent, and it knows that if Light were taken from Darkness, Darkness would remain isolated, unmanifest, 1 splendourless, powerless, ineffectual, strengthless.
“Wherefore is it constrained with all its intelligence and understanding to hold down to itself the lustre and spark of the Light together with the fragrance of the Spirit.
“And one can see an image of the nature of the latter in a man’s face—[namely] the pupil of the eye, 2 which is dark because of the waters underlying it, yet illumined by Spirit.
“As, therefore, the Darkness contends for the Splendour, in order that it may make a slave of the
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[paragraph continues] Light-spark and see, so also the Light and the Spirit contend for their own Power; they strive to raise and bring back to themselves those powers which are mingled with the dark and awesome Water beneath.
“Now all the powers of the three Principles, being infinitely infinite in number, are sagacious and intelligent each according to its own essence. And though they are countless in multitude, yet, being sagacious and intelligent, as long as they remain by themselves, they are all at peace.
“If, however, one power is brought into contact with another power, the dissimilarity in their juxtaposition brings about a certain motion and energy that takes its shape from the concurrent motion of the juxtaposition of the contacting powers. 1
“For the con-currence of the powers constitutes as it were the impression (τ ύ π ο ς ) of a seal struck off by concussion 2 so as to resemble the [die] that stamps the substances brought into contact with it.
“Since then the powers of the three Principles are infinite in number, and from the infinite powers are infinite concurrences, images of infinite seals are of necessity produced.
“These images, then, are the forms (ἰ δ έ α ι ) of the different kinds of living creatures.
“Now from the first mighty concurrences of the three Principles there resulted a mighty type of seal—Heaven and Earth.
“And Heaven and Earth have a configuration
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resembling a Womb, with the embryo 1 in the middle; and if (he says) one would bring this to the test of sight, let him scrutinise scientifically the gravid womb of whatsoever living creature he wishes, and he will find the model of Heaven and Earth and of all things between them lying before him without any alteration.
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“So the configuration of Heaven and Earth was such that it resembled a Womb as it were, according to the first concourse [of the three Principles].
“And again in the midst of Heaven and Earth infinite concourses of powers occurred, and every single concourse effected and expressed the image of nothing else but a seal of Heaven and Earth—a thing resembling a Womb.
“And in the Earth itself there developed from the infinite seals of different kinds of living creatures, [living things] still more infinite.
“And into all this infinity below the Heaven in the different kinds of living creatures, the fragrance of the Spirit from above together with the Light was sown and was distributed. 2. . .
“Accordingly there arose out of the Water a first-born source—Wind vehement and boisterous—and cause of all genesis.
“For by making a certain seething 3 in the waters it 4 raises up waves from the waters.
“And the genesis of the waves, being as it were a
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certain pregnant 1 impulse, is the source of the production of man or mind, whenever [this motion] quickens under the impulse of the Spirit.
“And whenever this wave, raised from the Water by the Wind, and rendering nature pregnant, receives in itself the power of production of the female, it keeps down the Light from above that has been sown into it together with the fragrance of the Spirit, —that is to say, mind that takes forms in the various types; that is a perfect god, brought down from the Ingenerable Light from above and Spirit into a human nature, as into a temple, by the course of Nature and motion of the Wind, generated from Water, commingled and blended with bodies, as though he were the salt of existing things and the light of the Darkness, struggling to be freed from bodies, and unable to find liberation and the way out of himself.
“For as it were a very minute spark. . . like a ray 2. . . .
“Every thought and care of the Light above, therefore, is how and in what way mind may be liberated from the Death of the evil and dark Body, 3 from the Father below, who is the Wind that in ferment and turmoil raised up the waves and brought to birth perfect mind, son of himself, and yet not his own in essence.
“For he was a ray from above, from that Perfect Light, overpowered in the sinuous 4 and awesome and bitter 5
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and blood-stained Water; and that Light is the Spirit of Light borne upon the water. 1. . .
“But the Wind, being both boisterous and vehement in its rush, is in its whistling 2 like unto a Serpent—a winged one.
“From the Wind, that is from the Serpent, the source of generation arose in the way that has been said; all things receiving together the beginning of generation.
“When then (he says) the Light and the Spirit have been received down into the impure and disorderly Womb of manifold suffering, the Serpent—the Wind of the Darkness, the First-born of the Waters—entering in generated man, and the impure Womb neither loves nor recognises any other form. 3
“And so the Perfect Logos of the Light from above having made Himself like unto the Beast, the Serpent, entered into the impure Womb, having deceived it 4 through His similitude to the Beast; in order that He may loose the bonds that are laid upon the perfect mind that is generated in the impurity of the Womb by the First-born of the Water—Snake, Wind, Beast.
“This (he says) is the Servant’s Form; 5 and this is
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the necessity of the Descent of the Logos of God into the Womb of the Virgin.
“But it is not sufficient (he says) that the Perfect Man, the Logos, has entered into the Womb of the Virgin and loosed the pains that are in that Darkness; nay, but after entering into the foul mysteries in the Womb, He washed Himself and drank the Cup of Living Water bubbling-forth—a thing that everyone must do who is about to strip off the Servant-Form and put on the Celestial Garment. ”
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There can be little doubt but that the main ideas in the background of this system of the Gnosis are closely connected with general Orphic and Chaldæ an ideas, and also with the main schematology of our “Pœ mandres” tractate.
From the Orphic tradition handed on by Apion we have seen that the Æ on is the Circle of Infinitude and Eternity illumined by the Logos.
THE “MITHRIAC Æ ON”
The whole of this Orphic lore (in other words, the Chaldæ an wisdom-teaching) seems to me to be summed up in one division of the symbolism of the Mithra-cult, as may be seen by an inspection of the monuments reproduced by Cumont, and especially those of the mysterious figure which he calls “la divinité lé ontocé phale, ” and the birth of the God from the Rock; this seems to point, as we might very well suspect, to a strong Chaldæ an element in the Mithriac tradition.
Cumont 1 tells us that although some scholars have rejected the name of “Mithriac Æ on, ” which was
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given by Zoë ga to this awe-inspiring mystic figure, 1 in his opinion (and he knows more of the subject than any other authority) it may very well have been actually called Æ on in the sacred books of the mysteries.
If, however, this was the case, the mystic meaning, says Cumont, was of such a nature that it was concealed from the profane.
Our classical authorities inform us that the Magi expressed the name of the Supreme God, which was in reality ineffable, by various substitutes. The general name for the Mystery Deity was Cronus, and Cronus in the sense of Time.
“The Mithriac Cronus is a personification of Time, and this fact, which is now fairly established, permits us immediately to determine the identity of this pseudonymous God.
“There is only one Persian divinity which he can possibly represent, and that is Zervan Akarana, Infinite Time, whom, from the time of the Achemenides, a sect of the Magi placed at the origin of things, and from whom they would have both Ormuzd and Ahriman to have been born.
“It was this God that the adepts of the mysteries placed at the head of the celestial hierarchy, and considered as the first principle; or, to put it differently, it was the Zervanist system that the Mazdæ ans of Asia Minor taught to the Western followers of the Iranian religion. ”
This all seems to me to point not to a Persian origin
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of the Æ on, as Cumont supposes, but to a Chaldæ an element dominating the Mithriac form of the Magian tradition. 1
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