Simon Magus and the Parrots

These are the contents of the sixth book of the Refutation of All Heresies.

What the opinions are that Simon tries to establish, and that he strengthens his teaching out of the writings of magicians and poets. What the opinions are that Valentinus puts forward, and that his system is built not out of the Scriptures but out of Platonic and Pythagorean doctrines. And what the opinions of Secundus and Ptolemaeus and Heracleon are — men who themselves also advanced the same teachings as the philosophers among the Greeks, but stated them in different words. And what the suppositions are that Marcus and Colarbasus put forward, and that some of them gave their attention to magical arts and to the Pythagorean numbers.

The opinions held by the men who took the first principles of their teaching from the serpent, and who in the fullness of time deliberately brought what they held out into public view, I have already set out in the book before this one, which is the fifth of the Refutation of Heresies. But I will not keep silent about the opinions of the men who follow these in succession either. I will leave not one of their speculations unrefuted, if only I can remember them all — together with the secret rites of these people, rites that may fairly be called orgies, since men who spread teaching this reckless are not far from the anger of God. I say it that way with the help of etymology. [c]

It seems right, then, to explain now the opinions of Simon, a native of Gitta, a village of Samaria; and we will prove as well that his successors took their starting point from him and have tried to establish the same opinions under a change of name. This Simon was an expert in sorceries. He made a mockery of many people, partly by the art of Thrasymedes, in the way I explained earlier, and partly by using demons to carry out his villainy, and he attempted to make a god of himself. The man was a plain cheat, and full of folly, and the apostles rebuked him in the Acts. Apsethus the Libyan, burning with the same wish, set about having himself considered a god in Libya with far more wisdom and restraint than Simon had. And since the legend of Apsethus is no great distance from the unbridled craving of that silly Simon, it seems worth explaining, as a fit companion to what this man attempted. [f]

Apsethus the Libyan craved beyond all measure to become a god. When, after repeated schemes, he failed altogether to get what he wanted, he still wished to appear to have become one — and in the end, as time went by, he did appear to have really become one. For the foolish Libyans took to sacrificing to him as to some divine power, supposing that they were putting their trust in a voice that had come down from above, out of heaven. He did it this way. He collected a great many birds — parrots — into one and the same cage, and shut them in. There are a great many parrots throughout Libya, and they imitate the human voice very distinctly. He fed the birds for a time, and while he did he was in the habit of teaching them to say, “Apsethus is a god.” After the birds had practiced this for a long while and were used to uttering the thing which, when said, he thought would make people suppose that Apsethus was a god, he opened their house and let the parrots out, each in a different direction. [h]

As the birds flew, their sound went out into all Libya, and their words carried as far as the Greek country. So the Libyans were astonished at the voice of the birds, and, not seeing the trick Apsethus had worked, they held Apsethus to be a god. But one of the Greeks, examining the matter closely, saw through the supposed god’s trick, and by means of those same parrots he not only refuted but utterly destroyed that boastful and tiresome man. The Greek shut up many of the parrots and taught them to say something new: “Apsethus caged us and forced us to say, Apsethus is a god.” And when the Libyans heard the parrots take it back, they came together and all decided with one mind to burn Apsethus.

This is how we have to think about Simon the magician: we may compare him to the Libyan far sooner than to the One who, though he was made man, was in reality God. But if the likeness holds exactly, and the sorcerer was gripped by the same passion as Apsethus, then let us try to teach Simon’s parrots something new — that Simon, the one who stood, stands, and will stand, was not Christ, but was a man, born of seed, the offspring of a woman, born of blood and fleshly desire, like the rest of humanity. That these things are so we shall easily prove as the discussion goes on. [i]

Now Simon, paraphrasing the law of Moses both foolishly and knavishly, makes his case this way. Moses says that God is “a burning and consuming fire.” Simon takes what Moses says in the wrong sense and asserts that fire is the originating principle of the universe. He does not consider what the statement actually says: not that God is a fire, but that he is a burning and consuming fire. So he does violence to the plain law of Moses, and on top of that he plagiarizes Heraclitus the Obscure. And Simon calls the originating principle of the universe an indefinite power, putting it this way: “This is the writing of the Announcement of voice and name, from the Intelligence of the Great Indefinite Power. Therefore it will be sealed, kept secret, hidden, and it will lie in the habitation at whose foundation lies the root of all things.” And he says that this man who is born of blood is that habitation, and that in him lives an indefinite power, which he calls the root of the universe.

Now the indefinite power, which is fire, is not, on Simon’s account, anything simple — not in line with those who say that the four elements are simple and who have therefore supposed that fire, being one of the four, is simple too. Far from it. Fire, he maintains, has a certain twofold nature, and of this twofold nature he calls one part something secret and the other something manifest; the secret parts, he says, are hidden inside the manifest parts of the fire, and the manifest parts get their being from the secret ones. This is what Aristotle calls “potentiality” and “actuality,” or what Plato calls “intelligible” and “sensible.” The manifest part of the fire contains all things in itself, whatever a man might make out and whatever objects of the visible creation he happens to overlook. But the whole secret part of the fire, which one may discern, is grasped by the intellect and slips past the senses; or else a man fails to notice it because he has no capacity for that kind of perception. In general, though: since all existing things fall under two headings — objects of sense and objects of intellect — and since Simon uses the words secret and manifest to name them, one may say that the fire, the fire above the heavens, is a treasure, like a great tree such as the one Nebuchadnezzar saw in a dream, out of which all flesh is fed. The manifest part of the fire he takes to be the trunk, the branches, the leaves, and the outer bark that covers them. All these parts of the Great Tree, he says, catch fire and disappear in the blaze of the all-devouring fire. But the fruit of the tree, if it is formed into an image and has taken its own shape, is put into a granary, not thrown into the fire. For the fruit was produced, he says, in order to be laid up in the storehouse, and the chaff in order to be handed over to the fire. And the chaff is the trunk, produced not for its own sake but for the fruit’s.

And this, he says, is what has been written in Scripture: “For the vineyard of the Lord of Sabaoth is the house of Israel, and the man of Judah is his beloved plant.” But if the man of Judah is the beloved plant, then it has been proved, he says, that there is no other tree but that man. And about the hiding away and the dissolving of this tree, Scripture, he says, has said enough. And as instruction for those who have been shaped after his image, this statement is enough: that “all flesh is grass, and all the glory of flesh is like a flower of grass. The grass withers and its flower falls, but the word of the Lord remains forever.” The word of the Lord, he says, is that word which is produced in the mouth, and it is a Word; nowhere else is there a place where it is generated. [q]

To put it briefly: since the fire is of this description, according to Simon, and since all things are visible and invisible, and in the same way sounding and not sounding, countable and not subject to counting, he names in the Great Announcement a perfect intelligible being — in such a way that each of those things which, existing indefinitely, may be infinitely comprehended, both speaks and understands and acts, in the manner Empedocles speaks of: [s]

For he is in the habit of holding, he says, that all these portions of the fire, both visible and invisible, have perception and a share of intelligence. The world, then — the thing that is generated — was produced out of the unbegotten fire. It began to exist, he says, in the following way. The one who was begotten from the principle of that fire took six roots, and those the primary roots, of the originating principle of generation. And the roots, he says, were made out of the fire in pairs; and these roots he calls Mind and Intelligence, Voice and Name, Reasoning and Reflection. In these six roots the whole indefinite power resides all at once — potentially, though, and not actually. [t]

And this indefinite power, he says, is the one who stood, stands, and will stand. So whenever he is made into an image, then, since he exists in the six powers, he will exist there in substance, in potential, in quantity, and completely; he will be one and the same power with the unbegotten and indefinite power, and he will labor under no greater deficiency than that unbegotten, unalterable, indefinite power. But if he continues only potentially in the six powers and has not been formed into an image, then he vanishes, Simon says, and is destroyed — in the same way that the capacity for grammar or for geometry is destroyed in a man’s soul. When the capacity takes an art to itself, a light of existing things is produced; but when it does not take an art to itself, the results are clumsiness and darkness, and, exactly as if the power had never existed at all, it perishes along with the man when he dies.

Now of those six powers, and of the seventh that exists alongside them, he calls the first pair, Mind and Intelligence, Heaven and Earth. One of them, being male, looks down from above and takes care of his partner, while the earth below receives the rational fruits, akin to the earth, that are carried down from the heaven. That is why, he says, the Word, looking again and again at the things being generated from Mind and Intelligence — that is, from Heaven and Earth — cries out: “Hear, O heaven, and give ear, O earth, because the Lord has spoken. I have brought forth children and exalted them, and they have rejected me.” The one who speaks these words, he says, is the seventh power — the one who stood, stands, and will stand; for he himself is the cause of those beautiful objects of creation which Moses praised, saying that they were very good. But Voice and Name, the second of the three pairs, are Sun and Moon; and Reasoning and Reflection, the third of the three pairs, are Air and Water. And through all of them, as I have said, is mingled and blended the great indefinite power, the one who stands. [v]

So when Moses has spoken of “the six days in which God made heaven and earth, and rested on the seventh from all his works,” Simon, in the way already described, gives these and other passages of Scripture an application their writers never intended, and makes a god of himself. When his followers say that there are three days begotten before sun and moon, they are speaking in riddles of Mind and Intelligence — that is, of Heaven and Earth — and of the seventh power, the indefinite one; for these three powers are produced before all the rest. And when they say, “He begot me before all the ages,” such statements, he says, are alleged to hold good of the seventh power. Now this seventh power, which was a power existing in the indefinite power and was produced before all the ages, is the seventh power about which Moses speaks these words: “And the Spirit of God was borne over the water” — that is, says the Simonian, the Spirit which contains all things in itself and is an image of the indefinite power Simon speaks of, “an image from an incorruptible form, which alone sets all things in order.” For this power that is borne over the water, being begotten, he says, from an incorruptible form alone, sets all things in order. [x]

When, then, according to these people, some such arrangement had come about, and one like it in the world, God, he says, set about forming man, taking clay from the earth. And he formed him not simple but twofold, according to his own image and likeness. Now the image is the Spirit that is borne over the water; and whoever is not shaped into a figure of that image will perish along with the world, since he continues only potentially and does not exist actually. This, he says, is what is meant by the words “that we should not be condemned along with the world.” But if a man is made into the figure of the Spirit and is generated out of an indivisible point, as it has been written in the Announcement, then, small as he is, he will become great. And what is great will continue for unlimited and unalterable duration, as being something that is no longer subject to the conditions of a generated thing.

How then, he says, and in what manner, does God form man? In Paradise; for so it seems to him. Grant, he says, that Paradise is the womb; and Scripture will teach you that this is a true assumption, when it says the words, “I am the one who forms you in your mother’s womb.” He wants this to have been written that way as well. Moses, he says, resorting to allegory, has declared Paradise to be the womb — if we ought to rely on what he says. But if God forms man in his mother’s womb — that is, in Paradise — as I have said, then let Paradise be the womb and Eden the afterbirth, and let “a river flowing out of Eden to water Paradise” be the navel.

This navel, he says, is divided into four principles; for on either side of the navel lie two arteries, channels of breath, and two veins, channels of blood. But when the umbilical vessels come out of Eden — that is, when the caul in which the fetus is wrapped grows into the fetus that is being formed near the upper belly (everyone alike calls this a navel) — then these two veins, through which the blood flows and is carried from Eden, the afterbirth, to what are called the gates of the liver, feed the fetus. And the arteries I have spoken of, the channels of breath, take hold of the bladder on both sides around the pelvis and connect it with the great artery called the aorta, along the line of the backbone. In this way the breath, making its way through the ventricles to the heart, produces the movement of the fetus. For the infant that was formed in Paradise neither takes food through the mouth nor breathes through the nostrils. It lay in the middle of moisture, and death was at its feet if it tried to breathe, for it would have been drawn away from the moisture and would have died accordingly. And one may go further than that: the whole fetus is bound tightly round by a covering called the caul, and is fed by a navel, and, as I have said, it receives the substance of the breath through the aorta along the line of the backbone.

The river, then, he says, which comes out of Eden is divided into four principles, four channels — that is, into four senses belonging to the creature that is being born: sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch. For the child formed in Paradise has these senses only. This, he says, is the law that Moses laid down, and it is with reference to this very law that each of his books has been written, as their titles show. The first book is Genesis. The title of the book is by itself enough, he says, for a knowledge of the universe. For this is the same in meaning as generation — that is, vision, the section into which one part of the river is divided; for the world was seen by the power of vision. [ac]

Again, the title of the second book is Exodus. For whatever has been produced must pass through the Red Sea and come into the wilderness — they say he calls blood the Red Sea — and taste bitter water. For bitter, he says, is the water that is drunk after crossing the Red Sea; and it is a road to be walked, one that brings us to the knowledge, in this life, of our toilsome and bitter lot. But once it has been altered by Moses — that is, by the Word — that bitter water becomes sweet. And that this is so we may hear alike from everyone who speaks in the language of the poets: