Page 49 - Gnosis volume 2

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the heavenly mysteries, may be quoted in this respect. After the advent of Christ,

certain traditions, hermetic until then, were partly revealed. And some of them were

incorporated in the doctrines of those schools which were attempting a synthesis of the
Greco-Judeo-Christian gnosis. A powerful movement of thought was launched by Simon

the Magician, a Samaritan, whose legendary personality is still clouded with mystery. A

few fragments of the doctrine he elaborated with the help of Menander have been
handed down to us by Satornil, who was a disciple of the latter. After a complicated and

absurd account of the events that preceded Creation, he relates that the first man

crawled like a reptile. He continues that Virtue took pity on man from on high, because

he had been made in His image, He sent him, therefore, a spark of Life that endowed

him with the faculty of standing upright and enabling him to live. It is this spark of Life —
according to Satornil — which, after death, rises towards the heavenly beings, to whom

29
it is related .
In sum, this fragment fits in with canonical Tradition, but is placed in the most fanciful
framework. The criticisms made by the Church Elders, amongst whom were St. Irene

and St. Clement of Alexandria, point out that the error of their adversaries, the Gnostics,

lay in the fact that intellectually, they detached man from the Cosmos in which he lives.

29
Philosophoumena, VII, 28, Quoted by J. Doresse, in The Secret books of the Egyptian
Gnostics, Paris, Plon, 1958, pp. 20-21.