By Water & Blood

Their books, heavens, and rejection of baptism

2. These people likewise have forged certain apocryphal books for themselves, whose names are these: one they call the so-called Little Harmony (Symphonia), and another the Great Harmony. But they also heap up for themselves whatever other books they happen to meet with, so that they may seem to confirm their error by many witnesses that are brought in besides.

Already they also make use of those called Allogenes; for there are books so named. And they take their cues from the Ascension of Isaiah, and still from certain other apocrypha.

But the whole of it comes from the book called Harmony, in which they say there is a certain ogdoad of heavens and a hebdomad, and that there are rulers in each heaven; and that those in the seven heavens are one ruler for each heaven, and that each ruler has ranks, and that the luminous Mother is highest of all in the eighth—just as the other heresies say.

And some of them are polluted in body with licentiousness, while others pretend a show of fasting and deceive the simpler people, putting on an air of monastic renunciation as monks.

They say that in each heaven, as I said before, there is a principality and an authority and certain angelic ministries, each ruler having begotten and made a ministry for himself; and that there is no resurrection of the flesh, but only of the soul.

They also anathematize the bath of baptism, even if some among them have previously been caught and baptized. And they reject participation in the mysteries and their goodness as something alien and done in the name of Sabaoth; for they want him, according to certain of the other heresies, to be tyrannizing in the seventh heaven and prevailing against the others.

They say that the soul is food for the principalities and authorities, and that without it they cannot live, because it is from the moisture above and supplies them with power.

And when it has come into knowledge and fled the baptism of the church and the name of Sabaoth who gave the law, it ascends through each heaven and gives an account to each authority, and so passes beyond to the higher Mother and Father of all, from whom indeed it came down into this world.

I have already said that they anathematize baptism, as “dead flies that spoil the preparation of fragrant oil,” as the parable in Ecclesiastes has been spoken of these people and those like them. For they are truly dead flies that bring death and putrefy the perfumer’s oil of fragrance—the holy mysteries of God that have been granted to us in the bath for the forgiveness of sins.