Simon Magus

The teaching

Taught from what the Acts, Justin, Irenaeus and Hippolytus record of his teaching, above all the Great Declaration.

The great power of God

In Samaria, the Acts of the Apostles records, the people gave heed to Simon from the least to the greatest, saying: This man is the great power of God. The name is the heart of his teaching as his followers kept it. Simon is the highest power, the Father who is over all things, and he lets himself be called by whatever name people give the divine: among the Jews he appeared as the Son, in Samaria he came down as the Father, and among the other nations he came as the Holy Spirit. He appeared as a man, though he was not one, and seemed to suffer in Judaea, though he did not suffer.

The fallen Thought

In the beginning, the teaching runs, there leapt forth from him his first Thought, the mother of all. Knowing her father's will, she went down to the lower regions and brought forth angels and powers, and they made this world. But the angels would not be thought the offspring of another. Out of envy they held her captive and did her every outrage, so that she could not return to her father.

Shut in a human body, she passed through the ages from body to body, as from one vessel into another. She was Helen, for whom the Trojan war was fought, and at the last she stood in a brothel at Tyre. She is the lost sheep of the Gospel parable, and Helena, the woman who travelled with Simon, is she.

The rescue

Simon came down, changed in form and made like the powers and angels through whose realms he passed, so that among men he appeared as a man, first to free her and then to bring salvation to human beings through the knowledge of himself. The angels governed the world badly, each one wanting to be first. The prophets spoke by the inspiration of these world-making angels, and so those who trust in Simon and Helena need not heed them: people are saved by his grace and not by just works. No deed is just by nature, but only by the custom the angels laid down to enslave human beings. He promised that the world would be dissolved, and that those who are his would be freed from the rule of its makers.

Irenaeus, who sets all this out as an enemy of the sect, adds that its priests practised magic and incantations, love charms, familiar spirits and the sending of dreams, and kept images of Simon in the form of Zeus and of Helena in the form of Athena.

Fire, the root of all

The book Hippolytus quotes as Simon's own teaches in another key. Irenaeus gives a myth of a fallen Thought and her rescuer; the Great Declaration gives a philosophy of fire and of a power hidden in every being, and both set one great power above the angels who made the world. The book opens as a sealed writing, the revelation of the voice and the name from the thought of the great power, the boundless, to be hidden and laid up in the dwelling where the root of all things is set. Its root is fire, and it takes the word from Moses, who says that God is a consuming fire.

Fire has a double nature, one hidden and one manifest. The hidden is concealed in the manifest, and the manifest has its being from the hidden, and everything that is, seen and unseen, comes from this fire. The world is like a great tree whose root is the fire. The fire feeds its trunk, its branches, its leaves and its bark, and when the fruit is formed and perfected it is gathered into the barn, while what is not formed is the chaff that goes to the fire.

The six roots and the one who stands

From the boundless power come six roots, in pairs: mind and thought, which are heaven and earth; voice and name, which are the sun and the moon; reasoning and reflection, which are air and water. In all of them is mingled the great power itself, the seventh, whom the book calls the one who stood, who stands and who will stand. He stood above in the unbegotten power; he stands below in the stream of the waters, begotten in an image; and he will stand above beside the blessed and boundless power, if he is made perfect in its image.

The power in every person

This power lies in every being, the book teaches, not yet in act but in potential, as the art of grammar or of geometry lies in a person who has not yet learned it. If it is brought out and formed into its image, it becomes in being and in power one with the boundless, unbegotten and unending. If it stays in potential and is never formed, it passes away and perishes, as the skill of grammar dies in a soul that never uses it. What is in a person by nature has to be worked out by them, or it is lost.

Paradise read in the body

The book reads the scriptures as a map of the human body. Paradise is the womb, and the river that goes out of Eden to water the garden is the navel, which parts into four channels to feed the unborn child as the river parts into four heads. The five books of Moses, in the same reading, are the five senses of the child once it is formed.