Adam, the Soul, and Hermes

These are the chief points of a great many discourses which, he says, James the Lord’s brother handed on to Mariamne. So then — to keep these godless men from telling any more lies against Mariamne, or against James, or against the Savior himself — let us go to the rites the whole invention was taken from. Let us look, if you like, at the foreign mysteries and the Greek ones together, and see how these people gather up the secret and unspeakable mysteries of all the nations, speak falsehood against Christ, and take in those who know nothing of what goes on in those rites. Since the foundation of their teaching is the man Adamas, and since they say it was written about him, “Who will declare his generation?” — see how they take, piece by piece, from the nations the begetting of the man that cannot be traced and cannot be told apart, and then fit it onto Christ as a fabrication. [a]

“The earth,” say the Greeks, “gave forth a man; the earth first bore a beautiful gift, wanting to be mother not of senseless plants or of brute beasts, but of a gentle creature, dear to the gods.” “It is hard,” he says, “to work out whether Alalcomeneus, first of men, rose among the Boeotians over Lake Cephisus; or whether it was the Idaean Curetes, a divine race; or the Phrygian Corybantes, whom the sun first saw springing up like growing trees; or whether Arcadia brought forth Pelasgus, older than the moon; or Eleusis produced Diaulus, who lived in Raria; or Lemnos fathered Cabirus, the fair child of secret rites; or Pallene the Phlegraean Alcyoneus, oldest of the giants. The Libyans say that Iarbas was firstborn, and that when he came up out of the dry plains he began to eat the sweet acorn of Zeus. But the Nile of the Egyptians,” he says, “to this day makes the mud fertile and so breeds living things, and gives up living bodies that take their flesh from damp vapor.” The Assyrians say that the fish-eating Oannes was the first man, and that he was produced among themselves. The Chaldeans say that this Adam is the man the earth alone brought forth; that he lay there without breath, without motion, still as a statue, an image of the one above, the man Adamas whom they praise in hymns, and who was begotten by many powers — about whom, one at a time, there is a long discussion.

So then, in order that the Great Man from above might at last be overpowered — the one, as they say, “from whom the whole family named on earth and in the heavens has been formed” — a soul was given to him as well, so that through the soul he might suffer, and so that the enslaved image of the Great and Most Glorious and Perfect Man, for that is what they call him, might be punished. So they ask again what the soul is, and where it is from, and what sort of thing it is by nature, that when it comes to the man and sets him moving it should enslave and punish the image of the Perfect Man. On this they do not make their inquiry from the Scriptures; they put this question too to the mystery rites. And they say the soul is very hard to find and hard to understand, because it does not stay in the same figure or the same form or in one single condition, so that a man could describe it by any sign or grasp what it is.

They have these various changes of the soul set down in the gospel titled “According to the Egyptians.” So they are in doubt, like everyone else among the nations, whether the soul comes from something that existed before it, or from the self-begotten one, or from a chaos spread out everywhere. And first they take refuge in the mysteries of the Assyrians, since they see the man as divided in three; for the Assyrians were the first to put forward the opinion that the soul has three parts and is still one.

Every nature, they say, longs for soul, and each in its own way; for soul is the cause of everything that is made. Everything that is fed, he says, and everything that grows, needs soul. It is not possible, he says, for anything to be fed or to grow where soul is not present. Even stones, he says, are alive, since they have in them what can increase; and increase never happens without feeding, because things that increase grow by addition, and addition is the food of the things that are nourished. So every nature, he says — in the heavens, on earth, and under the earth — desires a soul.

A thing of this sort the Assyrians call Adonis, or Endymion. When it is called Adonis, he says, Aphrodite loves and craves the soul under that name; and Aphrodite, for them, is coming-to-be. But whenever Persephone, that is Kore, falls in love with Adonis, the result, he says, is a certain mortal soul cut off from Aphrodite — that is, from generation. And if the Moon falls into craving for Endymion and love of his form, then, he says, the nature of the higher beings needs a soul too. But if the Mother of the gods castrates Attis, and keeps him as the one she loves, then, he says, it is the blessed nature of the beings above, the everlasting ones, that calls the male power of the soul back to itself.

For, he says, the man is male and female at once. On this account of theirs, and by such teaching, intercourse between a woman and a man is shown to be an utterly wicked and forbidden thing. For Attis, says the Naassene, has been castrated — that is, he has passed over from the earthly parts of the world below to the everlasting substance above, where, he says, there is neither female nor male, but a new creation, a new man, who is male and female at once. Where it is that they say “above,” I will show when I come to the right place for it. But they say it is not simply Rhea alone who bears witness to their account, but — so to speak — the whole creation; and they explain that this is what the Word says:

“For the invisible things of him are seen from the creation of the world, understood by the things he has made — his everlasting power and divinity as well — so that they are left without excuse. And so, though they knew God, they did not glorify him as God or give him thanks, but their foolish heart was made empty. Claiming to be wise, they became fools, and exchanged the glory of the incorruptible God for images in the likeness of corruptible man, and of birds, and four-footed beasts, and creeping things. And so God gave them up to shameful passions, for even their women exchanged the natural use for what is against nature.” What the natural use is, in their account, we will say later. “And in the same way the men also left the natural use of the woman and burned in their lust for one another, men with men doing what is shameful” — and “what is shameful” means, for these Naassenes, the first and blessed substance, which has no shape and is the cause of every shape in the things that are shaped — “and receiving in themselves the repayment for their error that was their due.”

For in these words that Paul spoke, they say, their whole secret is contained, and a hidden mystery of blessed pleasure. For the promise of the washing, in their account, is nothing else than bringing the one who is washed in what they call living water, and anointed with the unspeakable ointment, into unfading pleasure.

They claim there is evidence for their teaching not only from the mysteries of the Assyrians but also from those of the Phrygians, about the happy nature — hidden and at the same time disclosed — of the things that have been, and are coming to be, and will be. That happy nature, he says, is the kingdom of heaven that is to be looked for inside a man.

About this they hand down an express passage that occurs in the gospel titled “According to Thomas.” They put it this way: “The one who seeks me will find me in children from seven years old; for there I lie hidden, and in the fourteenth age I will be made plain.” But this is not Christ’s teaching; it is Hippocrates’, who says, “A child of seven years is half of a father.” And so these people, who put the origin of the universe in the seed that causes everything, and who have picked up Hippocrates’ saying that a seven-year-old child is half of a father, say that at fourteen years, according to Thomas, he is made plain. This, with them, is the unspeakable and mystical Word.

Then they say that the Egyptians — who, it is agreed, come next after the Phrygians in age above all mankind, and who were admittedly the first to make known to all the rest of men the rites and ceremonies of all the gods at once, along with the kinds and workings of things — have the sacred and solemn mysteries of Isis, which may not be spoken of to those who are not initiated. And these mysteries are nothing but what the goddess of the seven dresses and the black robe searched for and carried off: the genitals of Osiris. And they say Osiris is water.

The seven-robed nature, wrapped about and dressed in seven mantles of ether — for that is what they call the wandering stars, giving them the allegorical name of robes of ether — is, as it were, changeable generation, and is displayed as the creature transformed by the one who cannot be spoken or drawn or conceived and has no shape. And this, he says, is what Scripture means when it says, “The righteous man will fall seven times and rise again.” These falls, he says, are the changes of the stars, moved by the one who sets all things moving.

About the substance of the seed, which is the cause of everything that exists, they say that it is none of these things, but that it produces and forms everything that is made. This is how they put it: “I become what I want, and I am what I am. That is why I say that what sets all things moving is itself unmoved. For what exists remains, forming all things, and nothing of the things that exist is made.” He says that this one alone is good, and that what the Savior said is said about him: “Why do you call me good? One is good — my Father who is in the heavens, who makes his sun rise on the just and the unjust and sends rain on the holy and the sinners.” Who the holy ones are that he sends the rain on, and who the sinners are that the same one sends the rain on, we will explain later along with the rest.

And this is the great and secret and unknown mystery of the universe, hidden and revealed among the Egyptians. For Osiris, he says, stands in the temple in front of Isis, and there what is hidden stands bare, looking upward from below, crowned with all its own fruits of the things that are made. And such a figure stands not only in the holiest temples, chief among idols, but everywhere, for everyone to see — like a lamp not set under a basket but on a lampstand, proclaiming its message from the housetops, in every lane and every street and right beside the houses themselves, set up in front as a fixed boundary and limit of the house. And everyone calls this thing the good. They call it the good-producer, not knowing what they are saying. The Greeks took this mystic figure over from the Egyptians and keep it to this day: we see, says the Naassene, statues of Hermes honored among them in just this shape.

They give special honor to the Cyllenian and call him Logios. For Hermes is Word — the interpreter and craftsman of the things that have been made, and of the things being produced now, and of the things that will be, all alike — and he stands honored among them, shaped like a man’s genitals, with the power to drive from the parts below toward the parts above. And this god — a Hermes of this description — is, he says, the one who calls up the dead, guides departed spirits, and is the source of souls. This did not escape the poets of the nations either, who put it like this:

Not Penelope’s suitors, he says — you poor fools! — but souls woken up and brought back to the memory of themselves,

That is, from the blessed man above, the first man, or Adamas, as they take it, souls have been carried down here into a creature of clay, to serve the maker of this creation, Ialdabaoth, a fiery god, a fourth number. That is what they call the maker and father of the world of forms:

This, he says, is the one who alone has power over life and death. About him, he says, it has been written, “You will rule them with a rod of iron.” But the poet, wanting to dress up the incomprehensible power of the blessed nature of the Word, gave him a golden wand and not an iron one. And he charms the eyes of the dead, as he says, and wakes again those who are sleeping — that is, those who have been roused and have become suitors. And about them, he says, the Scripture speaks: “Wake up, you who are sleeping, and rise, and Christ will shine on you.”

This is the Christ who, he says, in all who have been begotten is the Son of Man depicted from the Word that cannot be depicted. This, he says, is the great and unspeakable mystery of the Eleusinian rites: Hye, Kye. And he says that all things have been made subject to him, and that this is what is meant by “their sound has gone out into all the earth” — just as it agrees with the words, “Hermes waved his wand and led the souls, and they followed him, twittering.” I mean that the disembodied spirits follow on and on, in the way the poet draws the picture when he says:

By “rock,” he says, he means Adamas. This, he says, is Adamas: “the chief cornerstone that has become the head of the corner.” For in the head is the substance, the shaping brain out of which the whole family is formed. “Whom,” he says, “I set as adamant in the foundations of Zion.” Speaking in allegory, he says, he means the making of the man. And the adamant that is set in is inside the teeth — Homer’s “fence of the teeth” — that is, a wall and a fortress, and inside it is the inner man, who has fallen into it from the first man above, Adamas. He has been “cut out without hands to make the division,” and has been carried down into the image of forgetfulness, being of earth and clay. And he says that the twittering spirits follow him — that is, follow the Word:

that is, he guided them —

That is, he says, into the everlasting places set apart from all wickedness. For where did they come?

This, he says, is Ocean, “the begetting of gods and the begetting of men,” whirled round forever by the eddies of the water, now upward, now downward. When the ocean flows downward, he says, there is a begetting of men; but when it flows upward, to the wall and the fortress and the White Rock, a begetting of gods takes place. This, he says, is what has been written: “I said, You are gods, and all of you sons of the Most High. If you hurry to escape out of Egypt and get beyond the Red Sea into the wilderness” — that is, out of earthly intercourse into the Jerusalem above, which is the mother of the living — “but if you turn back again into Egypt,” that is, into earthly intercourse, “you will die like men.”

For every begetting below, he says, is mortal, and what is begotten above is immortal, since it is born of water only and of spirit, being spiritual and not fleshly. But what is born below is fleshly — that is, he says, what is written: “What is born of the flesh is flesh, and what is born of the spirit is spirit.” This, in their account, is the spiritual begetting. This, he says, is the great Jordan, which flows downward here and kept the children of Israel from getting out of Egypt — out of earthly intercourse, I mean, since for them Egypt is the body — the Jordan that Jesus drove back and made flow upward.