The Well and the Snake-Woman

These claims, and others like them, are what the Sethians make in their endless commentaries. What they press on their pupils is the theory of composition and mixture. Many men have made a study of that theory, Andronicus the Peripatetic among them. The Sethians say that composition and mixture work in this way. The ray of light from above is mingled in, and the very small spark is delicately blended into the dark waters below; the two are united and formed into a single compound mass, in the way one smell comes from many incense offerings mixed in the fire. A man trained in it, having the test of a keen sense of smell, ought to be able to tell from the one smell of the incense exactly which of the offerings mixed in the fire is which — storax, say, and myrrh and frankincense, or whatever else has been mixed in. [a]

They use other examples too. Bronze, they say, is mixed with gold, and an art has been found that separates the bronze from the gold. In the same way, if tin or bronze or any substance of the same kind is found mixed with silver, these too are told apart by an art better than the art of mixing. And someone has already told water apart that was mixed with wine. So, they say, though all things have been mixed together, they can be separated. But learn the same lesson, he says, from the case of animals. When the animal is dead, each of its parts is separated; and when the dissolution takes place, the animal disappears in this way. This, he says, is what was spoken: “I did not come to bring peace on the earth, but a sword” — that is, the division and separation of the things that have been mixed together. For each of the things that have been mixed is separated and divided when it reaches its own place. As there is one place of mixture for all animals, so one place of separation has been appointed. And no one knows this place, he says, except us alone, who have been born again, spiritual and not fleshly, whose citizenship is in heaven above.

Slipping in among them this way, they corrupt their pupils. They do it partly by misusing quoted texts, wickedly twisting what has been admirably said in Scripture to serve any purpose they like, and partly by covering their vile conduct with whatever comparisons suit them. All these things that have been mixed together, he says, have, as has already been said, their own particular place, and they hurry toward the substances of their own kind: iron toward the magnet, chaff toward the neighborhood of amber, gold toward the spur of the sea falcon. In the same way the ray of light that has been mixed into the water, once it has been given its own proper place by discipline and instruction, hurries toward the Word that comes from above in the form of a slave; and along with the Word it exists as a word in the place where the Word remains. It goes to the Word faster than iron goes to the magnet.

And learn, he says, that these things are so, and that all the things that have been mixed together are separated in their own places. Among the Persians, in a city called Ampa near the river Tigris, there is a well; and beside the well, at the top, a reservoir has been built with three outlets. When a man pumps from this well and draws off some of its contents in a vessel, he pours whatever he has pumped out into the reservoir close by. When what he has poured in reaches the outlets, and what is taken up out of each outlet in a single vessel is examined, a separation is seen to have taken place. In the first of the outlets a deposit of salt appears, in the second one of asphalt, and in the third one of oil; and the oil is black, as Herodotus also reports, and it gives off a heavy smell, and the Persians call it rhadinace. This likeness of the well, the Sethians say, proves their case better than everything that was said before it.

The opinion of the Sethians has now, it seems to me, been made clear enough. If anyone wants to learn the whole of their teaching, let him read a book titled the Paraphrase of Seth; he will find all their secret doctrines stored up in it. But now that we have explained what the Sethians hold, let us look at the doctrines Justinus puts forward as well. [i]

Justinus stood completely against the teaching of the holy Scriptures, and against the teaching of the blessed evangelists, spoken and written, in the manner the Word used to instruct his disciples when he said, “Do not go off on the road of the Gentiles.” What that means is that they were not to give their attention to the empty teaching of the Gentiles. This man works to lead his hearers into accepting the marvels the Gentiles tell of and the doctrines they hold. He recounts, word for word, the tales current among the Greeks, and he does not first teach or hand over his perfect mystery: not until he has bound the man he is fooling by an oath. Then he brings these fables out to persuade him, so that people who are at home in the boundless trifling of these books may find some comfort in the details of the tales. It works the way it does when a man on a long journey thinks it sensible, once he has come upon an inn, to rest. [j]

And so, when they are drawn back once more to the study of the long-winded teaching of these lectures, they will not turn from it in disgust, but, under instruction drawn out further than it needs to be, will rush stupefied into the transgression Justinus has devised for them. Beforehand he binds his followers with horrible oaths neither to make these doctrines public nor to renounce them, and he forces an acknowledgment out of them. In this way he hands over the mysteries he impiously discovered for himself, using, as I said, partly the Greek legends and partly those pretended books that resemble to some extent the heresies described above. For all of them, forced together by one spirit, are drawn down into a single deep pit of filth, teaching the same doctrines and telling the same tales, each in a different manner. Yet every one of them calls himself a Gnostic in this particular sense: that they alone have drunk in the marvelous knowledge of the Perfect and Good One.

But swear, says Justinus: “If you want to know what eye has not seen and ear has not heard and what has not entered the human heart — that is, if you want to know the One who is good above all, the One who is higher than all — swear that you will keep the secrets of this teaching, since they are meant to be kept silent. For our Father too, when he saw the Good One and was initiated with him, kept the mysteries that silence is commanded about, and he swore, as it is written: ‘The Lord swore and will not change his mind.’” [m]

Having set his seal on these doctrines in this way, he goes on to snare his followers with more tales, spread out through a greater number of books, and so he leads his readers to the Good One, bringing the initiated to completion by admitting them to the unspeakable Mysteries. But rather than wade through more of their volumes, I will show what the ineffable mysteries of Justinus are out of a single book of his, since by his own supposition it is a work of high standing. This volume is titled Baruch. Out of the many fabulous stories he explains in it, I will point out one, because it can be found in Herodotus. He gives the story a different shape and then explains it to his pupils as though it were something new, being under the impression that the whole arrangement of his teaching springs out of it.

Herodotus, then, says that Heracles, while driving the cattle of Geryon from Erytheia, came into Scythia; and that, worn out with traveling, he withdrew to a deserted place and slept for a short time. While he slept his horse disappeared, the horse he had been riding on his long journey. When he was roused from his sleep he searched the desert carefully, trying to find the horse. He does not find it, but he does find in the desert a girl, half of whose form was a woman’s, and he asks her whether she has seen the horse anywhere. The girl answers that she has seen it, but that she will not show it to him unless he first comes with her for the purpose of sexual intercourse. Herodotus tells us that her upper parts, as far as the groin, were those of a virgin, but that everything below the body after the groin had the horrible look of a snake. [q]

Anxious to find his horse, Heracles agrees to what the monster asks. He had intercourse with her and made her pregnant, and after they lay together he foretold that she had three children by him in her womb at once, who were destined to become famous. He ordered her, when she gave birth, to give the children these names as soon as they were born: Agathyrsus, Gelonus, and Scytha. Then, receiving his horse back from the beast-like girl as the reward for this favor, he went on his way, taking the cattle with him as well. After this Herodotus has a long account, but enough of that for now. What the opinions of Justinus are, who carries this legend over into his account of how the universe came to be, I will explain.