Note 249 — BOOK V THE OPHITE HERESIES

This chapter is the most difficult of the whole book to account for, with the doubtful exception of the much later one on the Docetæ. A sect of Sethians is mentioned by Irenæus, who does not attempt to separate their doctrines from those of the Ophites. Pseudo-Tertullian in his tractate Against All Heresies also connects with the Ophites a sect called Sethites or Sethoites, the main dogma he attributes to them being an attempt to identify Christ with the Seth of Genesis. Epiphanius follows this last author in this identification and calls them Sethians, but does not expressly connect them with the Ophites, makes them an Egyptian sect, and does not attribute to them serpent-worship. The sectaries of this chapter are called in the rubric Sithiani, altered to Sēthiani in the Summary of Book X, and the name is not necessarily connected with that of the Patriarch. In the Bruce Papyrus, a Power, good but subordinate to the Supreme God, is mentioned, called “the Sitheus,” which may possibly, by analogy with the late-Egyptian Si-Osiris and Si-Ammon, be construed “Son of God.” Of their doctrines little can be made from Hippolytus’ brief but confused description. Their division of the cosmos into three parts does not seem to differ much from that of the Peratæ, although they make a sharper distinction than this last between the world of light and that of darkness, which has led Salmon (D.C.B. s.v., Ophites) to conjecture for them a Zoroastrian origin. This is unlikely, and more attention is due to Hippolytus’ own statement that they derived their doctrines from Musæus, Linus, and Orpheus. In Forerunners it is sought to show that the Orphic teaching was one of the foundations on which the fabric of Gnosticism was reared, and the image of the earth as a matrix was certainly familiar to the Greeks, who made Delphi its ὀμφαλός or navel. Hence the imagery of the text, offensive as it is to our ideas, would not have been so to them, and Epiphanius (Hær., XXXVIII, p. 510, Oehl.) knew of several writings, κατὰ τῆς Ὑστέρας, or the Womb, which he says the sister sect of Cainites called the maker of heaven and earth. In this case, we need not take the story in the text about the generation by the bad or good serpent as necessarily referring to the Incarnation. One of the scenes in the Mysteries of Attis-Sabazius, and perhaps of those of Eleusis also, seems to have shown the seduction by Zeus in serpent-form of his virgin daughter Persephone and the birth therefrom of the Saviour Dionysos who was but his father re-born. This story of the fecundation of the earth-goddess by a higher power in serpent shape seems to have been present in all the religions of Western Asia, and was therefore extremely likely to be caught hold of by an early form of Gnosticism. In no other respect does this so-called “Sethian” heresy seem to have anything in common with Christianity, and it may therefore represent a pre-Christian form of Ophitism. The serpent in it is, perhaps, neither bad nor good.