Chapter 6 : Simon of Samaria and Gnostic Radicality
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Chapter 6: Simon of Samaria and Gnostic Radicality
Stripped of the lies and calumnies in which the Judeo-Christian and Catholic traditions have clothed him, like a habit of derision, Simon of Samaria evokes the thinkers who, as much as Heraclitus or Lucrecius, has irresistibly inscribed himself in the modernity of each epoch.
A Hellenized Samaritan, born — according to the heresiologues — in the outskirts of Getta, in the course of the last years of the First Century before the Christian era, Simon was without doubt a philosopher and doctor in the manner of Paracles, whom he resembled in the care with which he interdependently approached the microcosm and the macrocosm, the body of man and the totality of the world.
The rare fragments of his last oeuvre suffice to suggest a radical will in the precise sense of the term: that which attaches itself to the root of beings and things. Issued from Greek rationality, his analysis undertook to render to the materia prima of the body (from which the mythical visions of the Pentateuch issued) that which the Hebraic religion had snatched from the luxury of desires so as to transpose them — through a catholic and castrating function — into the domain of the spirit.
* * *
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?)
* * *
In The Name of God,[100] Fossum explains that the Great Power, the Megale Dynamis, designated for the Samaritans the divine name but also the human force assumed by the divine manifestation. Although Simon removed its religious acceptance so as to assimilate it to a creative flux of life, of which the spark, revived by love, offers to the individual the capacity to create himself, the dominant mindset obeyed the religious conditioning that impregnated the sects both close to and radically different from the teachings of Simon, such as the Naassenes and the Barbelites, for whom sexual fusion remained under the obedience to a divinity.
The other singularity of Simon concerns the primacy that he accorded to the individual person and his/her body, interdependent with the cosmos. His project resided in the realization and the mastery of destinies, not in the notion of salvation that Christianity would impose for nearly two thousand years.
Simon appeared at a point of fracture. The unitary Jewish myth encountered in its decline the desacralized critique of Greek rationality, a market rationality. And, in the same way that the European Renaissance saw liberty concretized in the radicality of Paracelsus and La Boetie, the beginning of the First Century manifested in creators such as Simon of Samaria and Apollonois of Tyane a human presence, the memory of which the regression to Christian myth would suffocate, until myth and the sacred would disappear in their respective turns.
The teachings of Simon would not escape the regression that would impose the return to religious forms, a return whose triumph Hellenized and rationalized Judaism — purged of its orientalism — would consecrate by coronating with its Arachnean linen the bureaucratic empire that Rome propagated through out the world.
Its influence leaked out [transparait] among the Naassenes and the Barbelites. It touched Saul/Paul and Marcion, expressed itself in certain manuscripts at Hag-Hammadi. It penetrated even into the anti-Gnostic Christianity of the New Prophecy, in which Priscilla affirmed that the Christ “visited” her and slept near her in Pepuza — the New Jerusalem — and took the form of fire and “put his Wisdom in her.”
But it is especially in the Hermetic current, which was very important in Alexandria, that the connection [with Simon] imposed itself; with this connection it is easy to disentangle which one in the exchange is older.
“It is good that a new conception of the world proposes theurges such as Alexander of Abonatichos and Apollonois of Tyane,” Annequin writes.[101]
According to a remark attributed to Apollonois of Tyane, earth, water, air and vegetal fire compose an alchemy of the micro- and macrocosmic realization that Simon would not disavow: “The doors of the earth are open; the road of flowers is open. My spirit was understood by the spirit of the heavens, by the spirit of the earth, by the spirit of the sea, and by the spirit of the flowers.”[102]
It is not against such a Master’s degree that the Talmudists guarded: “Whomever researches the four things, what is high, what is low, what was at the beginning, what will be at the end [...], he would be better off if he had not been born.”[103]
The gnosis of Hermes Trismegiste presents a spiritualized version of the Simonian doctrine (“If you are made of Life and Light, and if you know it, you will one day return to the Life and the Light”). On the other hand, the tradition that expressed itself in the Apocalypse of Asclepius (the 8th scripture in Codex 6 of Nag-Hammadi) belongs to the Simonian theory of the Megale Dynamis:
If you want to see the reality of this mystery, see also the marvelous image of the union (synousia) that is consummated by man and woman: arriving in its turn, the semen gushes. At that moment, the woman receives the power of the man and the man also receives the power of the woman because such is the effect (energein) of the semen.[104]
A countercurrent to the morbidity that would be propagated by generations of Judeo-Christians, Gnostics, Marcionites, Anti-Marcionites, and Catholics, the Apocalypse of Asclepius thrashed those who scorned the world and “preferred death to life.”
Inversely, it was an abstract and speculative tendency that illustrated the Poimandres, which would inspire many Gnostic cosmogonies. After the separation of the light from the darkness, a struggle between two antagonistic principles ensued. The divine entity, seduced by the image that it projected in matter, desired to unite itself with it. The father creature, in androgynous form, thus engendered a composite creature, half-Logos and half-Anthropos, or primordial man (Adam, according to Jewish mythology).
From his superior part, man radiates a luminous particle, ejaculated by the divinity and imprisoned in him. In the beginning, the spermatic emission of the divine power spurted. However, panspermie is both spiritualized — the pneuma or breathe of life transcends the sperma — and assimilated to a Fall, a cascading slide from the light into the terrestrial matrix, obscurity, chaos, and matter.
In fact, what fundamentally distinguished Simon from the religious or Hermetic Gnostics is the nature of the amorous relation, a fundamental relation, exalted as creative force or, on the contrary, burdened with guilt, afflicted by the idea of downfall, mortified through renunciation, abstinence and asceticism.
Counter to Simonian radicality, one sees the brutal repression of the Esseno-Christian type and the hierogamoc rituals of the Naassenes and Barbelites, for whom ejaculated sperm nourished the divine pneuma, nay, magic practices. (Irenaeus, after taking himself to the Perates, wrote that “they call the matrix the factory of heaven and earth” (Hysteram autem fabricatorum coeli et terre).[105] Likewise, at the end of the Second Century, the Gospel attributed to Philip called the Plerome [the Totality], koinon, “nuptial chamber” or the “place of union.”[106] Delatte speaks of a magic stone called the “key to the matrix,” no doubt tied to a rite of participation in the fecund and sexual vitality that is the attribute of the Gods and that the magician hopes to appropriate like a particle of eternity.[107])
There is a magic inherent in fetal creation: the matrix forms the anthanor, the transmutation of the sperm and the ovum return in the notions of surrectio and resurrectio. The idea incurs the condemnation of the rabbis, according to a fragment collated by Koller: “God reserves three keys that he has not wanted to trust to any intermediary: those of the matrix, the rain, and the resurrection.”[108]
The So-Called Disciples of Simon
Amid the ignorance that the life and work of Menander dwelled in, it is necessary to credit his idea that Justin the Apologist was among the disciples of Simon, which is hardly easy. A Gnostic Samaritan, he taught at Antioch, where the Nazarenes enjoyed a certain influence. Irenaeus accused him of magical practices destined to vanquish the bad angels and resuscitate the dead so as to no longer die, which was a program that was at least vague and did not exclude the Esseno-Christian viewpoint.
It is the same with Satornil. Irenaeus borrowed from him a dualism of Samaritan type, which distinguished between El the Father, become the YHWH of the Judeans, and Elohim, his angelic cohort around whom rebels elements had created the bad world.[109] Only a Savior-Messiah could come exhausted from a universe surrendered to the forces of evil. And here Satornil, close to Essenism but not to Simon, extolled a strict asceticism. It seems that Satornil, who among the first to do so, had conferred upon his Messiah-Savior the emblematic name Joshua/Jesus.[110]
As far as Cerinthe, he was one of the Judeo-Christian philosophers preoccupied with the name and nature of the angelos-christos. Indications from Epiphanius of Salamis, who in the Fourth Century treated him as a false apostle, and from Irenaeus, who engaged in a polemic with the Apostle John, throw a contrario a certain light on the fundamental writings much later revised as the canonical Gospel attributed to John. One knows that at first the text carried traces of Naassenism and belonged to Christian Gnosticism. It isn’t impossible that Cerinthe — but this is only a hypothesis — was the author of a midrash that was revised many times before being placed under the name of John and that the meaning of this midrash would obey the syncretic will to accord Naassenism with Nazarenism, the Serpent-Redeemer or NHS thereby assuming the name of the Messiah Joshua/Jesus, himself identified with the crucified Serpent.
On the other hand, the shadow of Simon stands out more clearly against the group founded by Carpocrates and his son Epiphanius, and against the Gnostic Justin (not to be confused with the apologist decapitated in 165), the presumed author of the Book of Baruch, in which Genesis is analyzed in the light of the auto-creation of man (the autogene). God planted the Garden of Eden by bringing together two uncreated principles, Elohim and Eden, from whom would be born a third principle, the most elevated, Priapus, in whom the Good and the Life were concentrated.
The name of the Great Power multiplied with the [number of] sects. Michel Tardieu studied the concept of Bronte, the Thunder, in the Untitled Writing (2d of Codex VI in the Nag-Hammadi Library), and proved that it identified itself with the Megale Dynamis, that is, the Great Power that the Apocryphon of John called Ennoia, the Valentinians called Sophia, the Barbelites called Barbelo, and the Naassenes called Brimo-Demeter.[111]
The collection at Hag-Hammadi includes a hymn (NHL II, 8, 34–35), Ego eimi, which celebrates with a singular force the will of the individual to become his/her own creator, in the fusion of universal forces:
I am part of my Mother and I am the Mother, I am woman, I am the Virgin, I am the consoler of sadness, my spouse is he who engendered me and I am his mother and he is my father and my lord; he is my strength; what he wants, he says; by all rights I become, but I have engendered a lordly man.[112]
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