Simon Magus | Page 7

mind. For potentiality when it has obtained art becomes the light of
generated things, but if it does not do so an absence of art and darkness
ensues, exactly as if it had not existed at all; and on the death of the
man it perishes with him.
13. Of these six Powers and the seventh which is beyond the six, he
calls the first pair Mind and Thought, heaven and earth; and the male
(heaven) looks down from above and takes thought for its co-partner,
while the earth from below receives from the heaven the intellectual
fruits that come down to it and are cognate with the earth. Wherefore,
he says, the Word ofttimes steadfastly contemplating the things which
have been generated from Mind and Thought, that is from heaven and
earth, says: "Hear, O heaven, and give ear, O earth, for the Lord hath
said: I have generated sons and raised them up, but they have set me
aside."[19]
And he who says this, he says, is the seventh Power, He who has stood,
stands and will stand, for He is the cause of those good things which
Moses praised and said they were very good. And (the second pair is)
Voice and Name, sun and moon. And (the third) Reason and Reflection,
air and water. And in all of these was blended and mingled the Great
Power, the Boundless, He who has stood, as I have said.
14. And when Moses says: "(It is) in six days that God made the
heaven and the earth, and on the seventh he rested from all his works,"
Simon arranges it differently and thus makes himself into a god. When,
therefore, they (the Simonians) say, that there are three days before the
generation of the sun and moon, they mean esoterically Mind and
Thought--that is to say heaven and earth--and the seventh Power, the
Boundless. For these three Powers were generated before all the others.
And when they say "he hath generated me before all the Aeons," the
words, he says, are used concerning the seventh Power. Now this

seventh Power which was the first Power subsisting in the Boundless
Power, which was generated before all the Aeons, this, he says, was the
seventh Power, about which Moses says: "And the spirit of God moved
over the water," that is to say, he says, the spirit which hath all things in
itself, the Image of the Boundless Power, concerning which Simon says:
"_The Image from, the incorruptible Form, alone ordering all things._"
For the Power which moves above the water, he says, is generated from
an imperishable Form, and alone orders all things.
Now the constitution of the world being with them after this or a
similar fashion, God, he says, fashioned man by taking soil from the
earth. And he made him not single but double, according to the image
and likeness. And the Image is the spirit moving above the water,
which, if its imaging is not perfected, perishes together with the world,
seeing that it remains only in potentiality and does not become in
actuality. And this is the meaning of the Scripture, he says: "Lest we be
condemned together with the world."[20] But if its imaging should be
perfected and it should be generated from an "indivisible point," as it is
written in his Revelation, the small shall become great. And this great
shall continue for the boundless and changeless eternity (aeon), in as
much as it is no longer in the process of becoming.[21]
How and in what manner, then, he asks, does God fashion man? In the
Garden (Paradise), he thinks. We must consider the womb a Garden, he
says, and that this is the "cave," the Scripture tells us when it says: "I
am he who fashioned thee in thy mother's womb,"[22] for he would
have it written in this way. In speaking of the Garden, he says, Moses
allegorically referred to the womb, if we are to believe the Word.
And, if God fashions man in his mother's womb, that is to say in the
Garden, as I have already said, the womb must be taken for the Garden,
and Eden for the region (surrounding the womb), and the "river going
forth from Eden to water the Garden,"[23] for the navel. This navel, he
says, is divided into four channels, for on either side of the navel two
air-ducts are stretched to convey the breath, and two veins[24] to
convey blood. But when, he says, the navel going forth from the region
of Eden is attached to the foetus in the epigastric regions, that which is

commonly called by everyone the navel[25] ... and the two veins by
which the blood flows and is carried from the Edenic region through
what are called the