* * *

A particular malediction struck the majority of the censors. Fascinated by the works that they execrated, overwhelmed by their denatured and destructive rage, they succumbed to the need to cite extracts from the works, the existence of which they did not cease to deplore.

Around 230–250, the first version of a collection entitled Philosophoumena e kata pason aireseon Elenchos (“Philosophoumena or Refutation of All Heresies”), abbreviated as Elenchos, was published. Successively attributed to Origen and Hippolyte, the Bishop of Rome, the Elenchos truly emanated from the Christianity of the New Prophecy; it actually ranked among the heretics another Bishop of Rome, Callixte, accused of permitting the remarriage of widows and the pardon of Christians who abjured — through fear of torture — their crimes in the eyes of the people loyal to the New Prophecy.

So as to refute them with a great blunder, a chapter devoted to Simon quotes extracts from his work Apophasis megale. (A kind of objective irony has wanted things such that the most serious study to date of Simon of Samaria comes from a Jesuit, Salles-Dabadie. Not content to publish the Greek text with an ostentatious critique, he pushed scruples as far as establishing a typographical distinction between the text of the author, the remarks of Simon, and the interpolations. The ensemble illustrates quite well the treatment applied by the Christian or Catholic panegyrists to the manuscripts that they transcribed. To the extracts — interpreted as a function of the polemics of the time — were added canonical citations, most often multiplied by later copyists. It is thus a question of proving that the claimed heretic knew them, deformed them or interpreted them falsely. The canonical traditions were thus antedated.)

According to Salles-Dabadie, the Apophasis Megale “is the testimony of an archaic gnosis and not a later one.”[88]

Fragment 1 offers en incipit the original title (stripped of additions): Apophasis tes megales dynameos (“Revelation of the Great Power”). Much later, the work would be cited under the title Megale Apophasis (“Great Revelation”), in the manner of the Christians or the religious sects that dressed the philosopher up as a prophet and called him o hestos uios, the Son of “He who holds himself upright.” (The Judeo-Christians of the Homelies of Peter would fashion an impostor, a rival of Joshua/Jesus, but it is true that through the anecdotal Simon they aimed at the “false prophet” Saul/Paul).

The meaning of the text, Simon makes clear, “will be sealed, hidden, enveloped and placed in the dwelling in which the root of all has its foundations.”[89]

This dwelling is the man born from blood and (who) has come to live in the Infinite Power.[90]

The Great Power is nothing other than a fire that is, at the same time, hidden and apparent.

The visible (nature) of the Fire contains all visible things, those that one perceives and also those that remain unperceived (due to) fault of attention; the hidden (nature) of the Fire contains all intelligible things, those that come to thought and those that escape us (due to) fault of thought.[91]

Conscious and unconscious, Fire is the energy of life.

The cosmos as well has been engendered by an eternal fire. An uncreated energy, conferred upon its six roots: Nous and Epinoia (spirit and thought), Phone and Onome (voice and name), Logismos and Enthymesis (reason and reflection). The Great Power is enclosed in the six roots, but only in the state of potentiality.

Does it thus dwell in sleep? It doesn’t accede to the unity of its perfection: “It fades and disappears, as the power to (understand) grammar and geometry disappears in the human soul; because the power, helped by exercise, becomes the light of beings, but without exercise (it is) only incompetence and darkness; it disappears with the man who dies, as if it had never existed.”[92]

The six roots of being indissociably participate in the individual body and the cosmos. Nous and Epinoia are male and female, the heavens and the earth where the fruits of the macroscopic tree settle so as to reproduce themselves. Phone and Onome are the sun and the moon; Logismos and Enthymesis, air and water.

Each element composes with its equals a unity in which the Great Power (enclosed in each of them) re-creates itself. By reassembling the elements in which it was scattered — thus the behavior of Barbelo, the Judeo-Greek form of the Magna Mater, who collected the sperm of all the scattered beings with the goal of impregnating himself with a new universe — the Megale Dynamis revealed itself as the “seventh power.” (The seventh power would become Hebdomade in the Valentinian systems.) At the same time, it manifests the presence in the macrocosm and the microcosm of the Hestos: he who has stood up, stands up, will stand up. (Salles-Dabadie is surprised by the bizarreness of this formula. It can nevertheless only translate into Greek, estosa, stanta, stesomenon, the intemporal character of the verbs in Hebrew. The principle of a man assuming his potential divinity, standing at the center of himself and the world, is understood to be the antipode of the principle that expresses the name of Joshua/Jesus: God saved, saves, will save.)

Fire/energy, uncreated, thus engendered and fashioned man at the heart of corporeal and cosmic matter. Simon undertook to interpret the books of the Pentateuch, the only books recognized by the Yahwehist Samaritans, as the expression of the corporeal and terrestrial reality from which he judges them to be issued.

What does the Book of Genesis mean? Paradise is the matrix, Eden is the placenta, and the river that “leaves Eden and waters Paradise” (Genesis, 2, 10) is the umbilical cord.[93]

This divides itself into four branches because on the two sides of the cord are placed two arteries, canals of breath and two veins, canals of blood.[94]

When the umbilical cord, leaving the Eden/Placenta, fixes itself in the anatomy of the fetus, at the spot commonly called umbilic, the two veins conduct and transport the blood since the Eden/Placenta (fixes itself) in what one calls the ‘doors of the liver’ and they nourish the fetus.

As far as the arteries, which are — as we have called them — the canals of breath [pneuma], they pass along each side of the bladder in the region of the flat bone, and end up at the great spinal artery called the aorta; and thus, the pneuma passes through the ‘secret portals’ (the sigmoid valves), the road to the heart, and provokes embryonic movement (literally, the respiration of the fetus).

The infant, as it forms itself in Paradise, doesn’t take nourishment through its mouth and doesn’t breathe through its nostrils. Plunged into liquid, it would be die on the spot if it breathed; it would breathe the liquid and would be asphyxiated. But it is entirely enveloped by the membrane called amniotic; it nourishes itself through the umbilical cord, and as I have said, it is through the means of the spinal (artery) that it receives the substance of the pneuma. (*) [95]

(*) For Simon, pneuma meant “breath of life.” The Barbelites would identify pneuma with sperma. For the Judeo-Christians, it was the Spirit, before ending up, among the Catholics, as the Holy Spirit.

The four branches or vessels into which “the river that leaves Eden” were divided correspond to the four meanings of the fetus: sight, smell, taste, and sound. Touch only appears after the birth of the infant.

The river is what Moses called the Law, and each book addresses one of those meanings.

Genesis illustrates sight, the look that encompasses the cosmos. Crossing the Red Sea, Exodus is the road of blood that — through ordeals or bitterness — leads to knowledge of life. There begins taste, initiating itself in the “bitter water” (blood) that knowledge and the Logos change into sweet water, the source of life.

Simon, explaining the transmutation of blood into sperm, cites the flower of life offered by Hermes in the Odyssey (X, 304–305): “Its root is black and its flower like milk; the gods call it moly. Difficult to cultivate by mortal men; but the gods can do anything.”

Smell and breathing are connected to the third book, Leviticus; sound with the fourth, Numbers, the rhythm of which refers to the words. Finally, Deuteronomy refers to the touch of the new-born, who discovers the world by appropriating it. As Deuteronomy recapitulates the preceding books, touch summarizes and contains the other senses.

But here is the important part of Simon’s doctrine: the man who, in the formation and perfection of his senses, becomes aware of the presence in himself of the Great Power, and so acquires the power to restore it and re-create it in its becoming.

The unengendered things are all in us, as power, not in acts; thus grammar and geometry. If the aid of words and instruction thus intervene, if bitterness is changed to sweetness, that is to say, lances into scythes and swords into plowshares, we will not be of the straw and wood destined for the fire, but a perfect fruit, fully realized, equal to and resembling the unengendered and infinite Power. But if there remains only a single tree that does not produce perfect fruit, the arbor [l’arbre] must be destroyed.[96]

There exists an indissoluble relation between the microcosm of the individual body and the macrocosm. If man does not realize his nature of Fire, his original and immanent energy, “he will perish with the cosmos.” (The First Epistle to the Corinthians attributed to Saul/Paul takes an expression from Simon [I, XI, 32] that isn’t the only trace of residual Gnosticism in the scriptures of the enemy of Jacob and Peter. It gives a singular credit to the Homelies in which Simon designates Paul.)

What is the nature of the Great Power from the instant that it materializes itself in an engendered being? According to Simon, it is fire or the eternal energetic flux, identified with the Genesic [genesique] principle, sexual force.

Among all engendered beings, fire is the principle of the desire for generation, and it is just that the desire for changing generation is called ‘burning.’[97]

Therefore, fire, which is simple, undergoes two transformations: in men, in the blood, which is hot and red in the image of fire, is transformed into sperm; while in women, this same blood is transformed into milk. The masculine form (of fire) becomes a Genesic force and the feminine form becomes food for the new-born.[98]

There is, for Simon, a somatization of the Great Power: it manifests itself in the power to engender beings through desire, but also through the power of desire to engender in its turn — or more exactly re-creating it in the unity of its scattered fragments — the Dynamis of which all life is simultaneously the effect, the immanence and the becoming.

To become aware of the permanent flux of life reveals libidinal energy to be the source of a will capable of realizing in each the Great Power in acts that is none other than the government of the destinies. It is what the religious spirit translates with the expression “to become God.” Assuredly, no man in Antiquity, with the exception of Lucrecius, dared to affirm the primacy of the earth over the heavens and the man of desire over the spiritualized brute.

Completing the demythification of Genesis, Simon explains that the fire/desire energy is the flaming sword “that twirls [tournoie] to guard the road of the Tree of Life” (Genesis, 3, 24).

Because blood turns into sperm and milk, the Power becomes Father and Mother; the Father of the beings who are engendered, nourished from the beings who grow up. It needs nothing and is self-sufficient.

As far as the Tree of Life, ‘guarded by the flaming, twirling sword,’ it is the Great Power, as we have called it, born from itself, which contains all things and which resides in the six powers (that is to say, the six roots).

Because, if this sword of flames does not twirl, the beautiful tree will waste away and be destroyed; but if it turns into semen and milk, the Logos that resides in it through power, finding a convenient place, good for it to become the Logos of Souls, will begin with a very small flash, then it will grow more and more. It will grow until it becomes an infinite power, immutable, equal and similar to an immutable eon, which will no longer submit to becoming during the infinite eternity.[99]

Thus, the amorous conjunction of man and woman realizes through the act of creation the incarnation of the Great Power. From its conception, the infant receives with the Logos the flash of the Megale Dynamis. This flash will belong to it [the infant] by increasing its ardor as fire and Logos — otherwise called desire and consciousness of the creative act — , in order to realize in it the eternal presence of the energy that creates and re-creates itself without beginning, nor ending, and that is a flux of life.

For as much as each develops through desire and its consciousness (fire and its thought), through the Megale Dynamis from which it receives the spark, each is closer to passing from the state of receiver of energy to the capacity to act on it and the cosmos. Surpassing the monstrous couple, formed by man and his gods, the man of the Great Power invents a universe that belongs to him without reserve.

Simon is Gnostic only through the importance that he accords to the consciousness of the energy by which each person is assured the privilege of becoming the totality of the life that each carries within.

How does he not take exception to the men who created Gods by debasing themselves in the idea that the Gods created them? And how could he not be exposed to the hatred of people for whom the spirit religiously exalts itself through scorn for the earth, the body and desire?

The first travesty of Simon was to dress him in the reputation of a Man-God. Justin the Apologist incorrectly affirms that a statue was erected in Rome to the glory of this philosopher. He makes precise in his Apology, XXVI, that Simon was as adored as Zeus was. He speaks of a woman called “the first thought of Simon.” She was Epinoia, in whom the Nous had incarnated herself (she was symbolized by Athena in Greek philosophy). Anecdotally translated by Justin, the allegorical Epinoia became Helene, mistress of Simon, prostituted in a brothel in Tire. The Judeo-Christian staging erected him as a rival to another Man-God, one named Jesus, whose project was to destroy and disparage the man of energy invoked by Simon so as to edify and increase.

All things considered, perhaps it is necessary to impute to the disciples of Simon the same deification of which the Christian communities speak, claiming for themselves Jacob the Just and Simon-Peter, and [to note that] the insistence to summon [appeler] Saul/Paul from the name Simon “the Magician” suggests a kind of self-deification in which the presumed author of the Epistles assimilates the Great Power to the suffering and glorious Messiah, incarnated in each person. (Isn’t Paul identified with Hestos, with the God living in his heart, whom he calls Joshua/Jesus and champions?)