Note 34 — THE MYTH OF SIMON MAGUS

The chain is complete. We are dealing not with a historic person or persons, but with an ancient cult, which Christian ignorance and Judaic “monotheism” between them strove to reduce somehow to a historical narrative, as the myths of Abraham and Samson and Israel and Elijah and a dozen others had been reduced, as the mythic ritual had been in the gospels, and as indeed the rituals of Paganism had been in the current pagan mythologies. There was no Samaritan Simon the Mage, who met a Christian Peter; it was not a preaching Simon who taught of himself, but the Samaritan populace who traditionally believed of their God Sem or Simon, that “he appeared among the Jews as the Son, while in Samaria he descended as the Father, and in the rest of the nations he came as the Holy Spirit.”34 The parallel holds down to the last jot. The Semeion of the temple of Byblos had a dove on his head,35 and there are abundant Jewish charges as to the worship of a dove by the Samaritans at Mount Gerizim;36 so that Simon was the Logos receiving the Holy Spirit, the dynamis, just as Jesus did in the Gospels; and the Christists’ doctrine that the Holy Spirit should be given to the nations is simply an adaptation of the Samaritan syncretism, which they sought to override by a syncretism of their own in their latest gospel, where it comes out that their Galilean Jesus was called a Samaritan by Jews,37 a charge which curiously enough he does not dispute, denying only that he has “a daimon.” This is exactly the myth of Simon turned into a story of an incarnate Messiah, who affirms his reality.38 Well might the Fathers call their imaginary “Simon” the Father of all heresies. He was the “Father” in a sense of their own creed, as well as of all the Gnosticisms into which it broke.