Light, Darkness, and Spirit

This is the many-sided wisdom of the Peratic heresy. It is hard to set out in full, so tangled is it, since it appears to be put together out of the art of astrology. So far as it is possible, then, we will briefly explain the whole force of it. But in order to make their entire teaching plain in a short statement, it seems worth adding what follows. In their account the universe is Father, Son, and Matter, and each of these three has endless powers within itself. Between Matter and the Father sits the Son — the Word, the Serpent — always in motion toward the Father, who does not move, and toward Matter, which does. At one moment he turns toward the Father and takes the powers into himself; at another he picks these powers up and turns toward Matter. And Matter, which has no quality of its own and no shape, molds into itself the forms that come from the Son — the forms the Son molded from the Father. [a]

The Son takes his shape from the Father in a way that cannot be spoken or told or altered: in the way Moses says the colors of the young conceived at the watering troughs flowed from the rods set up there. In the same way, he says, powers flowed from the Son into Matter, just as the power that shaped what was conceived came from the rods onto the animals. And the difference of colors, the unlikeness that flowed from the rods through the water onto the flock, is (he says) the difference between the kind of generation that decays and the kind that does not. A painter working from life takes nothing away from the animals in front of him, yet with his brush he carries every one of their forms over onto his panel. In the same way the Son, by a power that belongs to him, carries the Father’s marks over from the Father into Matter. So all the Father’s marks are here — and none of them is.

For if any of the beings down here, he says, has the strength to see that he is himself one of the Father’s marks, carried down here from above and clothed in flesh — just as the rod’s work at conception produces something white — then he is of the same substance altogether with the Father in heaven, and he goes back there. But if he never lights on this teaching, and does not come to know why birth had to happen, then, like a miscarriage brought forth at night, he will perish at night. So when the Savior says, “your Father in heaven,” he means, they say, the one from whom the Son took his marks and carried them down here. And when Jesus says, “Your father was a murderer from the beginning,” he means the Ruler and Craftsman of matter, who took over the marks handed down by the Son and fathered offspring here — he is the murderer from the beginning; for his work brings on decay and death.

So no one, he says, can be saved or go back up again without the Son — and the Son is the Serpent. For just as he brought the Father’s marks down from above, so he carries them up again from here: roused out of their sleep, made the Father’s own marks once more, given substance out of what had none, and carried from here back to where they came from. This, he says, is what is meant by “I am the door.” And he carries those marks over, he says, to those who close the eyelid — as naphtha draws fire toward itself from every direction; or rather, as the magnet draws iron and nothing else, or as the spine of the sea hawk draws gold and nothing else, or as chaff is led along by amber. In this way, he says, the pictured, perfect kind, the kind that is of one substance, is drawn back out of the world by the Serpent; and he draws nothing else, since it was he who sent it down.

As proof of this they bring forward the anatomy of the brain. Because the brain itself does not move, they liken it to the Father; and the cerebellum they liken to the Son, because it moves and is shaped like a serpent’s head. And they claim that the cerebellum, by a process that cannot be told or searched out, draws in through the pineal gland the spiritual, life-giving substance that flows out of the vaulted chamber where the brain sits. Once it has received this, the cerebellum passes the ideas on to matter in a way beyond telling, just as the Son does; that is, the seeds and the kinds of everything produced in the flesh run down into the marrow of the spine. Using this as their model, they seem to slip in their secret rites, which are handed on without a word spoken. It would be an outrage for us to state them; but anyone can form an idea of them from all that has already been said.

I consider that I have now explained the Peratic heresy plainly, and by many arguments have brought into the open a system that until now had escaped notice, that mixes everything with everything, and that hides its own particular venom. So it seems best to put forward nothing beyond what has already been said. The opinions these men state themselves are enough to condemn them. [h]

Let us see, then, what the Sethians say. In their view there are three defined first principles of the universe, and each of these principles has infinite powers. And when they speak of powers, let the hearer take into account what they mean by it. Anything at all that you make out by an act of the mind, or fail to make out because you do not understand it, is by nature fitted to become each of the principles — the way every skill that can be taught is fitted to be in a human soul. For instance, he says, this child will become a piper by spending time with a piper; or a geometer with a geometer, a grammarian with a grammarian, a carpenter with a carpenter. And it goes the same way for anyone brought into contact with the rest of the skills. [i]

Now the substances of the principles, he says, are light and darkness, and between these two lies spirit, unmixed. The spirit is what has its appointed place between the darkness below and the light above. It is not spirit in the sense of a current of wind, or some light breeze you can feel, but something more like the smell of a perfumed oil, or of an incense made up out of many ingredients. It is a fine power that works its way in by some driving quality in a fragrance, a thing you cannot conceive of and better than words could tell. Light is above, darkness below, and spirit between them in the way just described. Light is so made that it shines down from above upon the darkness underneath, like a ray of the sun; and the fragrance of the spirit, holding the middle place, is stretched out and carried in every direction, the way we catch the smell of an incense offering laid on the fire being wafted everywhere. So when the principles, sorted under three divisions, have a power of this kind, the power of spirit and the power of light exist at the same time in the darkness that lies underneath them.

But the darkness is a terrible water, into which the light, together with the spirit, has been drawn down and carried over into a nature of this kind. The darkness is not without intelligence. It thinks things through, and it knows that where the light has been taken away from it, the darkness is left alone — unseen, dim, powerless, idle, and weak. So with all its thinking and all its understanding it is driven to gather into itself the shine and the sparkle of light, together with the fragrance of the spirit. You can see a picture of how these things stand in a human face: the pupil of the eye, dark from the fluids that lie behind it, and yet lit up with spirit. So, just as the darkness goes after the brightness in order to keep the spark prisoner and have the power to perceive, the light and the spirit go after the power that belongs to them: they struggle to lift themselves up, and to carry up toward each other their own powers, which are mingled into the dark and dreadful water lying underneath.

All the powers of the three first principles — endlessly many, past counting — are, each according to its own substance, thinking and intelligent, and beyond number in their multitude. And since these thinking, intelligent powers are past number, so long as they stay by themselves they are all at rest. But if power comes near power, the unlikeness of the two set side by side produces a certain motion and activity, shaped by the motion that follows from the meeting of the powers as they are set together and run into one. For the meeting of the powers happens the way the mark of a seal is made: the meeting stamps a figure answering to the seal onto the material brought up against it. So since the powers of the three principles are infinite in number, and infinite powers give infinite meetings, the impressions of infinite seals must be produced. And these impressions are the forms of the different kinds of living creatures. From the first great meeting of the three principles, then, comes a certain great form, a seal of heaven and earth. Heaven and earth have a shape like a womb, with a navel in the middle. And if anyone wants to bring this shape under his own eye, he says, let him carefully examine the pregnant womb of whatever animal he likes, and he will find in it a picture of heaven and earth, and of the things set unchangeably underneath, in the middle of it all.

So the first great meeting of the three principles produced a shape of heaven and earth like a womb after a first mating. And again, in between heaven and earth, infinite meetings of powers have been generated, and each meeting made and shaped nothing else than a seal of heaven and earth, like a womb. And again, on earth, out of the infinite seals infinite crowds of different animals are produced. And through this whole infinity of different animals under heaven the fragrance of the Spirit from above is spread and shared out, along with the light.

Out of the water, then, a firstborn first principle has been produced: wind — violent and roaring, and the cause of all generation. For the wind works a kind of ferment in the waters and lifts waves out of them; and the motion of the waves, just as when some driving power of pregnancy is the origin of the making of a man, or of a mind, is caused when the sea, stirred up by the driving power of spirit, is pushed forward. And when this wave, raised out of the water by the wind and made pregnant in its nature, has taken into itself the power of generation that belongs to the female, it holds together the light scattered from above along with the fragrance of the spirit — that is, mind molded into the different kinds. And this light is a perfect God, who is carried down out of the unbegotten radiance above and out of the spirit into human nature as into a temple, by the driving power of Nature and by the motion of the wind. It comes about from the water, mixed and blended with bodies as if it were the salt of the things that exist and a light of the darkness. And it struggles to be released from bodies, and cannot find release or a way out for itself. For a very small spark, a splinter broken off from above like the ray of a star, has been mingled into the heavily compounded waters of many things — as David, he says, remarks in a psalm.

So every thought and every care that moves the light above is about how, and in what manner, mind may be set free from the death of the corrupt and dark body, from the Father who is below — that is, from the wind that lifted the waves with noise and uproar, and that fathered a perfect mind as his own Son, though the Son was not in substance his own offspring. For that mind was a ray sent down from above out of the perfect light, and it was overpowered in the dark and dreadful and bitter and defiled water; and it is a shining spirit borne down over the water. So when the waves lifted out of the waters have received within themselves the power of generation that belongs to females, they hold the radiance poured into them, as a womb holds, in the different kinds — so that it is visible in every animal. But the wind, at once fierce and dreadful, whirling along, is like a serpent in the hiss of its sound.

First, then, from the wind — that is, from the serpent — came the first principle of generation, in the way described, all things having received the principle of generation at the same moment. Then, he says, once the light and the spirit had been received into that polluted, ruinous, disordered womb, the serpent, the wind of the darkness, the firstborn of the waters, goes in and produces man; and the unclean womb neither loves nor recognizes any other form. So the perfect Word of the light above, made like the beast — that is, like the serpent — entered the defiled womb, having tricked it by taking the beast’s own likeness, in order to loosen the chains that surround the perfect mind, the mind fathered amid the womb’s impurity by the first offspring of the water: serpent, wind, beast. This, he says, is the form of the slave, and this is why the Word of God had to come down into a virgin’s womb. But it was not enough, he says, that the Perfect Man, the Word, entered a virgin’s womb and loosed the pangs that were in that darkness. More than this was needed. After he went into the foul mysteries of the womb, he was washed, and drank the cup of living water bubbling up. And it was altogether necessary that he should drink, since he was about to strip off the slave’s form and put on heavenly clothing.

These are the claims that the champions of the Sethian teachings make, so far as it is possible to state them in a few words. Their system, though, is put together out of the natural philosophers and out of phrases said about entirely different subjects; and by shifting the sense of these over to their own doctrine, they explain them in the way we have described. They also claim that Moses backs up their teaching when he says, “Darkness, and mist, and storm.” These, the Sethian says, are the three principles. Or when Moses says that three were born in paradise — Adam, Eve, the serpent; or when he names three, Cain, Abel, Seth; or three others, Shem, Ham, Japheth; or three patriarchs, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob; or when he speaks of three days existing before sun and moon; or when he names three kinds of law: one that forbids, one that permits, and one that assigns a punishment. A law that forbids goes like this: “You may freely eat of every tree in paradise, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat.” But in the passage “Go out from your land and from your kindred, and come here, into a land that I will show you,” this law, he says, permits; for whoever is willing may go, and whoever is not may stay. And a law that assigns punishment is the one that declares, “You shall not commit adultery, you shall not murder, you shall not steal”; for a penalty is set for each of these wicked acts. [s]

But the whole system of their teaching comes from the ancient theologians Musaeus, Linus, and Orpheus — Orpheus above all, who sets out the ceremonies of initiation and the mysteries themselves. For their teaching about the womb is Orpheus’ teaching too; and the navel, which is harmony, carries the same meaning in the Bacchic rites of Orpheus. But before the mystic rite of Celeus and Triptolemus and Demeter and Persephone and Dionysus was kept at Eleusis, these rites had already been celebrated and handed down to men at Phlius in Attica. For earlier than the Eleusinian mysteries, the rites of the goddess called the Great One are performed at Phlius. There is a portico in that city, and on the portico is carved a representation, still to be seen today, of all the words that are spoken on such occasions. Many of the words carved on that portico are the ones Plutarch discusses in his ten books on Empedocles. And on most of these there is also drawn a certain aged man, gray-haired and winged, with his sexual organ erect, chasing a woman of a dark blue color who is fleeing from him. Over the aged man is the inscription phaos ruentes, and over the woman pereëphicola.

Now phaos ruentes seems to be the light, as the Sethians teach it, and phicola the darkish water, while the space in between the two seems to be a harmony made out of the spirit set in the middle. And the name phaos ruentes shows, so they claim, the flowing down of the light from above. So one may reasonably say that the Sethians celebrate rites among themselves that come very close to the rites of the Great One kept among the people of Phlius. And the poet too seems to bear witness to this threefold division when he says, “All things have been divided in three, and each has obtained its own share” — that is, each part of the threefold division has obtained a particular capacity. But now, as for their tenet that the water lying underneath is dark because the light has sunk into it, and that the spark carried down from that light must be recovered and taken back up — in asserting this, I say, the all-wise Sethians appear to take their opinion from Homer:

That is to say: in Homer the gods take water to be loathsome and horrible. And the teaching of the Sethians is like this, when it says that water is a dread thing to the mind.