By Water & Blood

On Simon Magus

Simon first, the Samaritan the magus, appeared as a servant of this one’s evil craft. Setting out from Gittha (this is a village of Samaria), and having advanced to the peak of sorcery, he first persuaded many, through the wonder-working he performed, to attend upon him and to name him some divine power. Then, seeing the apostles performing wonders that were truly genuine and divine, and granting to those who approached the grace of the Spirit, he asked to receive the same authority from them. But when the great Peter detected his thoroughly wicked intention and ordered him to heal the hard-to-cure wounds of his mind with the medicines of repentance, that man at once returned to his former evil craft; and leaving Samaria, as having received the seeds of salvation, he ran off to those not yet cultivated by the apostles, so that by deceiving the easily handled with his enchantments and binding them to his own mythologies he might render the doctrines of the holy apostles hard to accept.

But the divine grace armed the great Peter against this man’s madness. For following him, he scattered his foul teaching like a kind of mist and gloom, and displayed the rays of the light of the truth. Yet even though openly refuted, the thrice-wretched man did not cease arraying himself against the truth, until he arrived at Rome while Claudius Caesar was reigning. And he so astonished the Romans with his sorceries that he was even honored with a bronze stele. But again the divine Peter, arriving, stripped him of the wings of deceit; and at last, challenging him to a contest of wonder-working, and showing the difference between divine grace and sorcery, with all the Romans looking on, he dashed him down from a great height by prayer, and caught for salvation those who had been eyewitnesses of the wonder.

This man generated such a myth: he supposed some Infinite Power; this he called the root-stock of all things. He said that it is fire, having a double activity, one apparent and one hidden; that the world is generated, and has come to be from the apparent activity of the fire; and that first from it three syzygies were projected, which he also called roots; and the first he named Mind and Thought, the second Voice and Idea, and the third Reasoning and Conception. He named himself the Infinite Power, and said that he appeared to the Jews as Son, came down to the Samaritans as Father, and visited the other nations as Holy Spirit.

And taking as companion another woman standing on a rooftop, called Helen, he claimed that she was his first Thought, and named her Mother of all things, and said that through her he had also made the angels and the archangels; that the world was crafted by the angels; then that the angels, envying her, held her among themselves. For they did not wish, he says, to be called her creations. For this reason they also brought her into many female bodies, and into that Helen for whose sake the Trojan war took place. For her sake, he said, he himself had also come down, so as both to free her from the bonds laid upon her and to grant salvation to human beings through the recognition of him; and that he had come down altering himself, so as not to be known by the angels who administer the creation; and that he appeared in Judea as a man while not being a man, and suffered while having suffered least of all; and that the prophets had become servants of the angels. Those who believed in him he ordered not to attend to those prophets, nor to shudder at the threats of the laws, but to do as free men whatever they might wish; for they would obtain salvation not through good deeds but through grace.

For this reason those of his company dared every licentiousness, and used enchantments of every kind, contriving certain love-charms and drawing-spells, and pursuing as divine mysteries the other things proper to sorcery. And having fashioned an image of him in the form of Zeus, and of Helen in the shape of Athena, they burned incense and poured libations to these and worshiped them as gods, naming themselves Simonians. From this most bitter root sprang Cleobians, Dositheans, Gorthenes, Masbotheans, Adrianists, Eutychetes, Cainists. But all these, having invented small variations of the impious heresy, did not last for long, but were handed over to utter forgetfulness.