Note 522 — Chapter X · THE SYSTEM OF THE PISTIS SOPHIA AND ITS RELATED TEXTS[459]

This Adamas seems to be an essentially evil power, who wages useless war against the Light on the entry of Jesus into his realm (p. 25, Copt.). His seat is plainly the Twelve Aeons or Zodiac (p. 157, Copt.), and it is said in the Μέρος τευχῶν Σωτῆρος that his “kingdom” is in the τοποι κεφαλης αἰωνων or Places of the head of the Aeons and is opposite the place of the Virgin of Light (p. 336, Copt.). In the second part of the same document (i.e. the μ. τ. σ.) it is said that the rulers of Adamas rebelled, persisting in the act of copulation (συνουσία) and begetting “Rulers and Archangels and Angels and Ministers (λειτουργοί) and Decans” (Δεκανοί), and that thereupon Jeû went forth from the Place of the Right and “bound them in Heimarmene and the Sphere.” We further learn that half the Aeons headed by Jabraoth, who is also once mentioned in the Pistis Sophia proper (p. 128, Copt., and again in the Bruce Papyrus, Amélineau, p. 239), were consequently transferred to another place, while Adamas, now for the first time called Sabaoth Adamas, with the unrepentant rulers are confined in the Sphere to the number of 1800, over whom 360 other rulers bear sway, over whom again are set the five planets Saturn, Mars, Mercury, Venus, and Jupiter (pp. 360, 361, Copt.). All this seems to me to be later than the Pistis Sophia proper, to have been written at a time when belief in astrology was more rife than in Hadrian’s reign, and to owe something to Manichaean influence. The original Adamas, the persecutor of Pistis Sophia herself, seems identifiable with the Diabolos or Cosmocrator of Valentinus, in which case we may perhaps see in the “Great Propator” a merely stupid and ignorant power like the Jaldabaoth of the Ophites and their successors. See p. 163 infra.