Stars, Numbers, and the Brain

He says that the Lyre and the Crown have been drawn up on either side of him — I mean the Kneeler — and that he bends his knee and stretches out both hands, as though he were making confession over sin. The lyre, he says, is a musical instrument put together by the Word while the Word was still altogether an infant; and the Word is the one the Greeks understand as Hermes. On the making of the lyre Aratus says this: [a]

It has seven strings, and by those seven strings it signifies the whole harmony and framing of the world, tuned as it is; for in six days the world came to be, and on the seventh it came to rest. So then, he says, if Adam makes his confession and watches the head of the Beast, as God commanded, and copies the Lyre — that is, follows after the Word of God, that is, obeys the law — he will receive the Crown that lies beside him. But if he neglects it, he will be dragged down along with the Beast that lies beneath him, and will have his portion, he says, with the Beast.

The Kneeler seems to throw out his hands on both sides, touching the Lyre with one and the Crown with the other — and this too is his confessing — as can be seen from the figure itself. All the same, the Crown is plotted against and pulled away from him by another beast, a smaller dragon, which is the offspring of the one the Kneeler holds down with his foot. And a man stands there gripping hard with both hands, dragging the Serpent backward away from the Crown, and not letting the beast touch it, however hard it strains. Aratus calls him the Serpent-holder, because he holds back the Serpent’s rush to reach the Crown. But it is the Word, he says, who in the shape of a man keeps the beast from reaching the Crown, out of pity for the one plotted against by the Dragon and by that Dragon’s offspring at the same time.

The Bears themselves, they say, are two sevens, made up of seven stars apiece, images of two creations. For the first creation, he says, is the one according to Adam, in toil — this is the figure seen on his knees. The second creation is the one according to Christ, by which we are born again — this is the Serpent-holder, who fights the beast and keeps it from reaching the Crown that has been made ready for the man.

The Great Bear is Helice, he says, a symbol of the great creation, toward which the Greeks sail — that is, toward which they are being trained. Carried along by the waves of life, they follow after it, this creation or teaching or wisdom being a sort of spiral that leads those who follow it backward. For the name Helice seems to mean a twisting and a wheeling around to the same points. The other Bear is a small one, an image, as it were, of the second creation, the one made according to God. For few, he says, are those who travel by the narrow road. And they say the narrow one is Cynosura, the Bear that Aratus says the Sidonians steer by. Aratus said “Sidonians” for the Phoenicians, naming a part for the whole, because the wisdom of the Phoenicians is a thing to marvel at; and the Greeks say the Phoenicians are the people who came from the Red Sea and settled in the country where they live even now. That is Herodotus’ opinion.

Cynosura, he says, is this Bear: the second creation, the small one, the narrow road — and not Helice. For it does not lead backward; it guides those who follow it straight ahead, being a dog’s tail. And the Dog is the Word: partly guarding and keeping the flock that the wolves plot against; partly hunting the beasts out of creation and destroying them; and partly begetting all things, and being what they call kyōn, that is, the begetter. This, they say, is why Aratus, speaking of the rising of the Dog, has put it this way:

Here is what he means. Plants put into the ground before the rising of the Dog have often not struck root, and yet they are thick with leaves and give onlookers every sign that they will bear; they look alive, though they have no life in them from the root. But when the rising of the Dog comes, the living are separated by the Dog from the dead, for whatever has not taken root really does wither. So this Dog, he says, being a kind of divine Word, has been appointed judge of the living and the dead. And as the Dog — the star — is watched at work on the plants of this creation, so, he says, the Word is watched at work on the plants of heaven, which are human beings.

For some such reason, then, the second creation, Cynosura, stands in the sky as an image of the creation that belongs to the Word. The Dragon lies stretched between the two creations, keeping anything from crossing over out of the great creation into the small one, standing guard over the things fixed in the great creation — the Kneeler, for instance — and watching how and in what manner each thing stands in the small creation. And the Dragon himself is watched at the head, he says, by the Serpent-holder. This image stands in heaven, he says, and is a kind of wisdom to those able to see it. And if it is unclear at this point, he says, creation teaches men to philosophize by another image, about which Aratus has spoken this way:

Cepheus is near him, he says, and Cassiopeia and Andromeda and Perseus — great letters of creation to those able to see. For he says Cepheus is Adam, Cassiopeia is Eve, Andromeda is the soul of them both, Perseus is the Word, the winged descendant of Zeus, and the Sea Monster is the beast that lays the plot. The one who kills the beast comes to none of the others but to Andromeda alone; and taking Andromeda to himself, who had been handed over and bound to the beast, the Word — that is, Perseus — sets her free, he says. And Perseus is the winged axle that runs through both poles by way of the middle of the earth and turns the world round. [m]

The spirit that is in the world is the bird, the Swan, near the Bears — a musical creature, a symbol of the divine Spirit; because when it has come to the very end of life, it alone by nature sings, sending up hymns to God as it takes its leave of the wicked creation with good hope. And crabs and bulls and lions and rams and goats and kids, and all the other animals whose names are used for the stars across the sky, are images and patterns, he says, from which the changeable creation takes its forms and is filled up with animals of that kind.

Using accounts of this sort they think they can deceive a great many people — everyone who attends to the astrologers with more curiosity than is good for him — trying out of that material to put together a way of worshipping God that is far out of keeping with what these men themselves supposed. So, dear friends, let us run from the eared owl’s way of gaping at trifles; for these things and things like them are dancing, not truth. The stars declare nothing of the kind. It was men, on their own, who called certain stars by these names, so that the stars would be easy to mark out. What do a bear, or a lion, or a kid, or the Water-carrier, or Cepheus, or Andromeda, or the phantoms that are given names down in Hades, have in common with stars scattered across the sky — remembering that these men, and the names themselves, came along long after the human race began? What, I say, do the two have in common, that the heretics should be so thunderstruck at the marvel as to work up their own teachings out of talk like this? [p]

But since nearly every heresy has used the art of arithmetic to come up with measures of sevens and certain emissions of Aeons — each one tearing the art apart differently, though whatever variation there is lies only in the names — and since Pythagoras is their teacher in this, the first to hand such numbers on to the Greeks from Egypt, it seems best not to leave even this out, but to set it out briefly and then go on to the demonstration of the things we have proposed to investigate. [r]

There arose arithmeticians and geometers, and Pythagoras seems to have been the first to furnish them with their principles. From numbers, which can go on advancing forever by multiplication, and from figures, these men took their first principles, as things to be discerned by reason alone. For the starting point of geometry, as one can see, is a point, which has no parts; and from that point the art discovers how endless figures are generated out of the point. For when a point flows out into length it becomes a line, having a point for its limit; and a line flowing out into breadth begets a plane, whose limits are lines; and a plane flowing out into depth becomes a body. And when a solid has come into being in this way, the nature of a huge body has taken its stand out of the very smallest point. This is what Simon says, in these words:

The small will be great, being like a point, and the great will be without limit. — which follows exactly the point of the geometers.

As for arithmetic, whose philosophy works by putting things together, number became its first principle: something undefined and beyond grasp, holding in itself all the numbers that can go on to infinity in quantity. The first principle of the numbers, in substance, became the first monad, which is a male monad, begetting all the rest of the numbers as a father does. Second is the duad, a female number, which the arithmeticians also call even. Third is the triad, a male number; and this one too they have laid down is to be called odd. On top of all these is the tetrad, a female number, and this same one is called even because it is female. So all the numbers, taken by kind, are four — though number, as a kind, is undefined — and out of these is put together the number they call perfect, the decad. For one, two, three, four make ten, as has already been shown, provided each of the numbers keeps the name that belongs to it in substance. This is the sacred tetraktys of Pythagoras, having in itself the roots of ever-flowing nature — that is, all the other numbers; for eleven and twelve and the rest take the beginning of their generation from the ten.

Of this decad, the perfect number, there are four parts, called number, monad, square, and cube; and their couplings and mixtures take place for the generation of increase, completing, according to nature, the number that begets. For when a square is multiplied by itself it becomes square-of-square; when a square is multiplied by a cube it becomes square-of-cube; and when a cube is multiplied by a cube it becomes cube-of-cube. So all the numbers come to seven, in order that the generation of the things generated may come out of a seven — which is: number, monad, square, cube, square-of-square, square-of-cube, cube-of-cube.

This is the seven that Simon and Valentinus changed the names of and then told wonder-tales about, improvising a system for themselves out of it. Simon names them this way: Mind, Thought, Name, Voice, Reasoning, Reflection; and the one who stood, stands, and will stand. And Valentinus: Mind, Truth, Word, Life, Man, Church — and the Father counted along with them — on exactly the same principles as the men who practiced arithmetical philosophy. Marveling at it as at something the crowd does not know, and following after it, they put together the heresies they had thought up themselves.

Some, then, also try to build their sevens out of medicine, thunderstruck at the dissection of the brain, and say that the substance of the universe, and the fatherly power, and divinity can be learned from the arrangement of the brain. For the brain, being the ruling part of the whole body, lies still and unmoving, holding the breath within itself. Now an account of that kind is not implausible — but it is a long way from what these people are attempting. For the brain, when it is cut open, has inside it what is called the little vault, and on either side of this are thin membranes, which they call the little wings. These are gently moved by the breath and in turn drive the breath back toward the cerebellum; and the breath, running through a vessel that looks like a reed, moves on to the pineal gland. Beside this lies the mouth of the cerebellum, which takes in the current of breath and passes it up into what is called the spinal cord. From there the whole body gets its share of the breath, since all the arteries hang from this vessel like a branch; and the end of that vessel finishes at the generative vessels, which is where the seed too, passing from the brain by way of the loins, is discharged. The shape of the cerebellum is like the head of a serpent — about which those who profess the knowledge falsely so called have a great deal to say, as we will show. Six other pairs grow out of the brain, which run around the head and hold the body together, ending in the head itself; and the seventh goes from the cerebellum down into the lower parts of the rest of the body, as we have said.

About this too there is a great deal to say, and from it both Simon and Valentinus will be found to have taken their starting points here as well — and, even if they will not admit it, to be first liars and then heretics. Since, then, it seems that we have set even these matters out well enough, and since everything that passes for a teaching of this earthbound philosophy has been taken in within four books, it seems right to move on to the disciples of these men — or rather, to the men who stole their words.