The Serpent and the Four Rivers

The Phrygians go further, and say that the father of the universe is Amygdalus — not a tree, he says, but the Amygdalus who existed before anything else. Having the perfect fruit in himself, throbbing and stirring in the depth, he tore his own breast open and brought out his child, who is now invisible and nameless and beyond speech — the one we are speaking of. For the word amyxai means, as it were, to burst and to cut clean through, as he says happens with inflamed bodies that have a swelling in them; and when the doctors have cut it, they call the cuts amychai. This, he says, is why the Phrygians call him Amygdalus, and from him proceeded and was born the Invisible One, “through whom all things were made, and without him nothing was made.” And the Phrygians say that what was produced from him is Syriktas, the piper, because the Spirit that is born is in tune. “For God,” he says, “is Spirit; and that is why the true worshippers worship neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem, but in spirit. The worship the perfect offer,” he says, “is spiritual, not fleshly.” [a]

But the Spirit, he says, is there where the Father is also named, and the Son is born there from this Father. This, he says, is the many-named, thousand-eyed Incomprehensible One, whom every nature desires — though each in a different way. This, he says, is the word of God, a word that discloses the Great Power. That is why it will be sealed and hidden and kept out of sight, lying in the dwelling where the base of the root of the universe lies: Aeons, Powers, Intelligences, Gods, Angels, spirits that have been sent, Things That Are, Things That Are Not, Things That Can Be Begotten, Things That Cannot, Incomprehensibles, Comprehensibles, Years, Months, Days, Hours, and the indivisible Point, from which the least of things begins to grow little by little. What is nothing, and is made of nothing, being indivisible — a point, I mean — will become, by its own power of reflection, a magnitude past comprehension. This, he says, is the kingdom of heaven, the grain of mustard seed, the point in the body that cannot be divided; and no one, he says, knows this point except the spiritual. This, he says, is what was said: “There is no speech and no language where their voice is not heard.”

In this way they recklessly take anything at all that anyone has ever said or done and force it to fit their own frame of mind, insisting that everything turns out to be spiritual. That is why they claim that even the performers in the theaters say and do nothing without a design in it. So, he says, when the people have gathered in the theaters and a man comes in wearing a remarkable robe, carrying a lyre and playing on it while he sings of the great mysteries, this is what he says, not knowing what he is saying:

This, he says, is Attis of many forms; and when they celebrate him in a hymn, these are the words they say:

For these and other reasons like them, these people constantly attend the rites called the mysteries of the Great Mother, believing above all that in the ceremonies performed there they are looking at the whole mystery. For they have nothing beyond what is done there, except that they are not castrated: they simply finish the work of the castrated men. With the utmost strictness and watchfulness they order abstinence from intercourse with a woman, as though they had been castrated. Everything else in the proceedings they follow, as we have already described at length, exactly as castrated men do.

And they worship nothing but Naas, and that is why they are called Naassenes. Naas is the serpent, and from that word — Naas — come all the things under heaven that are called temples, naous. To him alone, that is, to Naas, every shrine is dedicated, and every rite of initiation, and every mystery; and in general no religious ceremony could be found under heaven in which there is no temple, naos, and in the temple itself is Naas, from whom it got the name of temple. They also say that the serpent is a moist substance — just as Thales of Miletus said of water — and that nothing that exists, immortal or mortal, alive or lifeless, could hold together at all without him. All things are subject to him; he is good; and he has all things in himself, as they are in the horn of the one-horned bull. So he gives beauty and bloom to everything that exists, each according to its own nature and character, passing through them all, like “the river that goes out from Eden and divides into four heads.”

They say that Eden is the brain, bound and tied tight in the wrappings that go around it, as if in heaven; and they take man, down as far as the head only, to be Paradise. So “this river that goes out from Eden” — that is, out of the brain — “is divided into four heads. The name of the first river is Pishon: this is the one that encircles the whole land of Havilah. There is gold there, and the gold of that land is fine, and there is the carbuncle and the green stone.” This, he says, is the eye, which by the honor it holds among the body’s organs, and by its colors, bears witness to what is said. “But the name of the second river is Gihon: this is the one that encircles the land of Ethiopia.” This, he says, is hearing, since Gihon is a winding stream, like a kind of labyrinth. “And the name of the third is Tigris: this is the one that flows opposite the Assyrians.” This, he says, is smell, and he uses the exceedingly swift current of that stream to picture it. It flows opposite the Assyrians because in every act of breathing, after the breath goes out, the air drawn in from outside comes with quicker motion and greater force. That, he says, is the nature of breathing.

“But the fourth river is Euphrates.” This, they say, is the mouth, through which prayer goes out and food comes in. The mouth gladdens and nourishes and shapes the spiritual perfect man. This, he says, is “the water above the vault of the sky,” and about it, he says, the Savior declared: “If you knew who it is that is asking, you would have asked him, and he would have given you living, bubbling water to drink.” Into this water, he says, every nature comes, choosing its own substances, and from this water its own particular quality comes to each nature — more surely than iron comes to the lodestone, or gold to the bone of the sea hawk, or chaff to amber.

But if anyone, he says, is blind from birth and has never seen the true light, “which gives light to every man coming into the world,” let him recover his sight from us, and let him see, as though through some paradise planted with every kind of tree and loaded with fruit, water making its way through all the trees and all the fruit. He will see that out of one and the same water the olive chooses and draws oil for itself, and the vine wine, and so with the rest of the plants, each after its own kind. But that Man, he says, has no reputation in the world and a famous name in heaven; he is betrayed by those who do not know what he is to those who do not know him at all, and he is reckoned “a drop from a jar.”

But we, he says, are the spiritual ones, who choose our own particular quality out of the living water of the Euphrates that flows through the middle of Babylon, passing through the true gate, which is the blessed Jesus. And of all people, we Christians alone are the ones who complete the mystery at the third gate, and are anointed there with the unspeakable ointment from a horn, as David was — not out of an earthenware flask, he says, as Saul was, who kept company with the evil demon of fleshly craving.

These few remarks out of many we have thought it right to bring forward, for the silly and crazy attempts of their folly are past counting. But since we have set out their unknown knowledge as well as we could, it seemed worth adding this too. They have composed a psalm in which they appear to gather all the mysteries of their error into a hymn, and it runs like this: [o]

These, then, are the doctrines the Naassenes try to establish, calling themselves Gnostics. But the error is many-headed and takes many shapes; it is, in truth, like the hydra we read of in the old story. Once we have struck the heads off this delusion one at a time by refuting it, wielding the staff of truth, we will destroy the monster outright. For the heresies that remain do not look very different from this one; they are joined to one another by the same spirit of error. But since they change the words and the names of the serpent, and want the serpent to have many heads, even so we will not fail to refute them thoroughly — exactly as they wish. [q]

There is also, beyond question, another head of the hydra: the heresy of the Peratae, whose blasphemy against Christ has gone unnoticed for many years now. This is a fitting moment to bring the secret mysteries of such men into the light. [r]

They claim that the world is one and divided in three. Of their threefold division, one portion is a single originating principle, like a huge spring that can be divided in thought into endless segments. The first segment — the one they rank ahead of the others — is a triad, and it is called a Perfect Good and a Paternal Greatness. The second portion of their triad is, as it were, an endless crowd of powers generated out of themselves; and the third is particular. The first, the good one, is unbegotten; the second is a good that produces itself; and the third is begotten. So they say outright that there are three Gods, three Words, three Minds, three Men. For to each portion of the world, once the division has been made, they assign Gods and Words and Minds and Men and all the rest.

But out of the unbegotten state, and out of the first segment of the world, once the world had afterwards reached its completion, there came down from above — for reasons we will give later — in the time of Herod a certain man called Christ, with a threefold nature, a threefold body and a threefold power, having in himself all the compounds and all the powers that come from the three divisions of the world. And this, says the Peratic, is what is meant by the words: “All the fullness was pleased to dwell in him bodily.” In him the whole Divinity of the triad, divided in this way, resides. For, he says, from the two worlds lying above — the unbegotten one and the self-producing one — seeds of every kind of power have been carried down into this world of ours. What the manner of that descent is, we will explain later.

The Peratic then says that Christ came down from above out of the unbegotten state, so that by his coming down everything in the threefold division might be saved. For some things, he says, are carried down from above and will go up again through him; but whatever beings lay plots against the things carried down from above are cast off, put under punishment, and abandoned. This, he says, is what is meant by the words: “For the Son of man did not come into the world to destroy the world, but that the world might be saved through him.” By “the world,” he says, he means those two parts that lie above — the unbegotten portion of the triad and the self-produced one. And when Scripture says “that we may not be condemned along with the world,” he takes it of the third portion, the particular world. For the third portion, the one he calls the world we live in, must perish, while the two that lie above must be rescued from corruption.