Chapter 7: The phallic and fusional cults

The conquest of the lands of Canaan by the Hebrew invaders began by Judaizing and thereby honoring the agrarian cults among the vanguished so as to better strike to prohibit and defame their persistent practice. The same for the rites of adoration of the Serpent, in which the symbolic participates in phallic power and, at the same time, the mysteries of fecundation.

Despite the danger that certain species present, the serprent evokes by the grace of its movements the dance of love, to which the bodies of the lovers surrender themselves. Doesn’t the allegory of salvation — the caduceus in which two serpents intertwine — conserve the memory of the force of life inherent in pleasure and in its slow reptation? More than any other mythology, the Bible changed the serpent into an object of abjection, terror and evil.

I would like to conjecture that the religious spirit that substituted itself for an analogical and totemic approach to the serpent — which in a certain way removed from it the perils of venom and strangulation — emphasized to the point of hyperbole a danger of death that instead issued from the anathema hurled against this part of life and pleasure, so hostile to the power of the Spirit and its priests.

The Hebrews annexed the cult of the serprent into their gestating monotheistic syncretism in the form of the seraphim (the “seraphins,” much later changed into angels).

In Deuteronomy (8, 15), nahash seraph designates the burning serpents that murder people in the desert. Numbers (21, 6) speaks of nahashim seraphim. If the word seraph is applied to serpents, it is because of an idea of a “burning bite,” because the root of the word in Semitic [languages] is the verb “to burn” and, more precisely, in Jeremiah (7, 31), the act of burning infants on the altar of Baal.[113]

Fecundation and expiating sacrifice of the new-born, infant or animal, inscribed themselves in the essence of the religions: the production of lives reduced to the force of work implies the destruction or the repression of nonproductive libidinal energy.

The serpent (nahash, NHS) plays a predominantly sexual role in Genesis. It is condemned sexually, as is well illustrated by a Talmudic tradition (Aboda Zara, 22 b): “When the serprent possessed Eve, he inoculated her with filth.”[114] And Genesis is no less explicit in the resolution of Adam (3, 20) to call his wife Hawwah (Eve), playing on the word hayah, which expresses the idea of life and is similar to the Aramaic hivyah, “serpent.” Much later, Clement of Alexandria would remark that, “if one thickens a little the pronunciation of the name of the first woman, one would evoke in Jewish ears the name of the female of the serpent species.”[115]

Sexual initiation, with its lascivity or art of caresses, originally depended on the privileges of the woman. The patriarch, whom the violation of the earth by the agriculture of labors had carried to an absolute power, treated women in the same spirit of exploitation. The lascivious and feminine undulation of exuberant life fell under prohibition, while he erected himself under the sign of the power of the phallic “plowshare,” symbolized by the bronze serpents that Moses held erect in the desert, carriers of a mortified life — serpents whose venom impregnated women and nature, both condemned to produce until exhausted.

This serpent, triumph and terror of virile politics, would be transformed in Hebraic mythology into Satan. Alan Rowe has shown the importance of the cult of the serpent at Beth-Shan, where he led a campaign of excavations. Beth-Shan would not be other than the House of the Serpent-God and Shahan the divinified serpent. He remarks that shahan read backwards is nahash, the root NHS expressing in its diverse permutations the idea of the serpent in all of the Semitic languages.[116]

It was the archaic cult of the serpent — at the same time proscribed and recuperated by Judaism — that connected the sects that, owing to their encounter with the Judeo- and Hellenized Christianities, strove to integrate it into their salvational myths, influencing certain tendencies before falling under the condemnation of the New Prophecy and Catholicism.

The Naassenes or Ophites

The late and rudimentary study of the history of the Naassenes left one in ignorance concerning the Messianic groups — active between Judaic antiquity and the appearance in Egypt, and particularly in Alexandria — that speculated upon the redemptive nature of the Serpent or NHS (nahas).

The Naassenism of Alexandria perhaps constituted a syncretism that brought together Jewish, Phoenician, Egyptian and Greek elements. The Phoenicians gave to the serpent the name Agathodaimon, “beneficent being” (the apotropaic meaning is not obvious). The Egyptians translated Agathodaimon as kneph, which one finds in the knouphis (coiled serpents) of amulettes or abraxas. The contribution of the old Ophidian cult of the Greeks would lend to Naassenism the belated name Ophitism.[117]

When Nazareanism gained importance towards the end of the First Century, the Naassenes, in a statement from their ecumenical assembly, did not reject the integration of the name Joshua/Jesus into the diverse [list of] names of their Ophis-Christos, their Serpent-Messiah: Kneph, Agathodaimon, NHS, Abrasax.

Around 230–250, the concurrent character of Jesus and the Ophis-Christos worried Origen and made him indignant. Blaming a Naassene prophet named Euphrates, he judged it useful to make this precise: “The Ophites are not Christians, they are the greatest adversaries of Christ.”

Moreover, the confusion between Christians and Naassenes proceeded from a tardy evolution, as Fossum remarks: “The serpent is transformed into a redeemer as much as the God of the Old Testament was found to be degraded into a harmful Demiurge, devoid of wisdom, named Ialdabaoth, who doesn’t know that there is a God beyond him.”[118]

Whatever the case, in the First Century Naassenism entered into the quarrel of Messiahs who agitated the religious milieu from all sides. Despite the revisions and rewritings, the Canonical Gospel attributed to John (*) retained, as did the Apocryphal Gospel attributed to Thomas, traces of a fundamental writing belonging to the Naassene current in which Iesous-Christos was substituted for Ophis-Christos.

(*) “And in the same way that Moses would raise the Serpent in the desert, likewise it was necessary that the Son of Man was raised so that whomever believed in him had eternal life” (Gospel attributed to John, 3, 14–15).[119]

In the necessity in which it found itself falsifying history so as to demonstrate its antiquity, the Church would advance the idea that the Naassenes were inspired by Jesus so as to make NHS a suffering and redeeming Messiah. But beyond the fact that Naassenism greatly preceded Christianity, the Church was not even constrained to draw its inspiration from the martrydom of the Master of Justice or Dusis. Because the primary nature of the seraphims that are closest to God is the serpent, as the Book of Henoch (20, 7; 61, 10; 71, 7) calls it. It wanted to reveal to Adam and Eve the pleasure in and knowledge of the union in which divine immortality dwells, and this is why the jealous God punished it, nailed it to the ground or, according to certain texts attributed to Moses, to the Tree of Life on which its skin hung, crucified.

The Gospel of Truth, discovered at Nag-Hammadi, still tells the history of the Garden of Eden from a Naassene point of view: the principle of divine wisdom — equal to that of Sophia, the Angel-Messiah or the pneuma — proposed to offer knowledge to Adam and Eve. The Jealous God prohibited them access to gnosis and, expelling them from Paradise, condemned them to a mortal destiny.

NHS, the serpent of knowledge and pleasure — in the manner of the Kundalini, which wakes the body to its potential richness — introduced into the human being, male and female, the vital breath, which was called the pneuma or the Spirit in the religious groups.

From what the Serpent-God penetrated into Eve and into Adam, which was insufficient for immortality, certain people have inferred that the Naassenes practiced coupling in a sexual indifferentiation that symbolically recreated the original androgyny. Perhaps it was to them that the remark sometimes attributed to Simon of Samaria was addressed: “All earth is earth, and it does not matter where one sows seeds [seme].”

No doubt there existed a diversity of sects in Naassenism, since certain tendencies extolled asceticism and thus embraced Esseno-Christianity, as much as others practiced sexual liberty in the name of the fusion of man, woman and world, entwined in NHS.

The invocation of a primordial erotic entity was expressed in a representation that was frequently engraved on the talismatic stones or amulettes in the form of a cameo, to which one gave the name abraxas by deformation of the name of power, Abrasax.

It was a tutelary God with the head of a rooster and legs in the form of serpents. Armed with a shield and a whip, it repelled hostile forces and erected itself phallically in the interior of an oval that symbolized the sex [organs] of the woman. Solar at the head and terrestrial in the ophimorphic legs that formed the support of sexual power, it was a God of fusion, the invocation of whom was modeled on the “song of the seven vowels”[120] that corresponded to the seven spheres that the initiate, elevated by amorous ecstasy, had to cross to attain the Great Power.

It is thus possible that, among the Naassenes, there developed the idea of salvation through sexual enthusiasm, quite close to Tantrism and dressed in a religious travesty of Simon’s thought.

The idea that the Logos, in the manner of a serpent that coils in the form of a circle — thus forming the ouroboros or serpent that bites its own tail and often figured on the abraxas — , descended to matter and returned to God, from whom it issued, suggested to the Naassenes an interpretation of Genesis that imitated Simon:

The Ocean that flows in circles from high to low and low to high, and the Jordan that descends and resumes its course, are the images of a single and same Logos that moves itself and constitutes the most intimate essence of the living world. Another symbol of this process is that of the serpent, naas or ophis, in the form of the serpent that bites its tail, thus figuring the cycle of becoming, the Hen to Pan. The serpent is the only object of their cult. ‘It is the humid element (the Ocean and the Jordan); without it, no being in the world could constitute itself, immortal or mortal, animate or inanimate. All is subject to it; it is good; it contains in a single horn, as in the horn of a bull (Deuteronomy, 33, 17), the beauty of all beings and it gives the grace of youth to each creature according to its own nature; because it impregnates all things “in the manner of the river that flows from Eden and divides itself into four branches”’ (Genesis, 2, 10; Elenchos, V, 9 12–15). Eden, from whence flows the river — this is the brain of man, the celestial spheres are the membranes that envelop the brain. The paradise that crosses the river is the head of man. The four branches in which it divides itself: the Pison, the Geon, the Tigres and the Euphrates, are sight, sound, breath and mouth. From the mouth comes prayer, the Logos as much as word; through the mouth comes nourishment, the spiritual nourishment obtained by prayer: ‘It gladdens, nourishes and forms the pneumatic, the perfect man.’[121]

According to the Elenchos (as always), which seems to refer to a Christianized Naassenism — because this is radically divergent from the philosophy of Simon — , the Naassenes divided man “into three parts, of which the first is spiritual, the second psychical, and the third terrestrial. It is through knowledge of this man that knowledge of God begins: the knowledge of man, they say, is the beginning of perfection; the knowledge of God is the consummation” (Elenchos, V, 6, 4–7). And the author of the Elenchos adds, accrediting a connection between the Naassenes and the Nazarenes: “Such are the capital points of the many doctrines that Jacob, the brother of the Savior, transmitted to Mariamne.”

Who was Mariamne? Not the Jewish Queen, wife of Herod who was put to death at the age of 90 (she lived from 60 [B.C.E.] to 29 [C.E.]), but another name for the Jewish Achamoth, the Greek Sophia, who would become Myriam-Marie, Virgin and Mother of the Savior in the evangelical novels about Jesus.

It was Mariamne, issued from the antique Magma Mater, whom the Naassenes placed above Chaos. She engendered the Son of Man (Adam), of whom NHS was one of the incarnations, to save the men of the bad world in which the Demiurge holds them prisoner, at least according to the Ophites, whose doctrines are reported by the Elenchos. (Celse speaks of Christians drawing their origin from Mariamne [Origen, Contra Celsum, V, 63].)

The work of the Demiurge produced corruption and death. Then the Ophis-Christos, born to the Virgin Mariaumne, intervened:

‘Thus no one can be saved, nor rise again, without the Son, that is to say, the Serpent. In the same way that he supplied from above the imprints of the Father, likewise, inversely, he carried back from down here the imprints of the awakened Father and reprized the traits of the Father’ (Elenchos, V, 17, 78). The entire cycle is conceived as a natural cycle, one might say almost physical. The superior Logos attracts the spiritual element of matter: ‘As the Napitha attracts to itself all parts of fire, or rather as it aims to attract iron and only iron, as the beak of the falcon of the sea attracts gold but only gold, as amber attracts the scraps of paper; thus the Serpent brings back from the world, at the exclusion of everything else, the perfect race formed in the image of the Father and likewise of his essence, such that it had been sent by him down here.’[122]

Perates, Cainites, Nicolaites, Koukeens

The phenomenon of the proliferation of the sects didn’t only touch Esseno-Baptism, but also characterized the great religious currents issued from other sources, Judean or Samaritan. Naassenism was divided into rival groups, communities or Churches. In the doctrinal confusion of the first two centuries of the Christian era, the fundamental consent proceeded less from the name and nature of the Messiah — NHS, Seth, Joshua, Dusis, Adam, Sophia, Barbelo, etc. — than a behavior marked by asceticism and the renunciation of or surrender to the pleasures of love, or the repression of constrained desires.

The aggressive remarks in the Elenchos in fact reveal a constant: “The priests and the guardians of this doctrine were those whom one would call, at first, the Naassenes, from the Hebrew word naas, which means ‘serpent’; thereafter, they also called themselves Gnostics, claiming to only know the depths. They divided themselves in many sects so as to form a multiple heresy that in fact, in reality, was only one heresy, because it is the same thing that they designate with different names, with the result that rivalries have profited at the expense [progres] of the doctrine” (Elenchos, V, 3, 3–4).

Koukeens, Phibionites, Stratiotics, Levitics, Perates, Cainites, Nicolaites — so many mysterious names and local designations of groups anchored with their particularities to a communal faith or the fantasmatic fruits of the heresiologues, who were always anxious to exhibit the chaos of the heterodoxies so as to underline the unity of the “true” belief in a “true” Messiah.

The preeminence of a saving Mother Goddess and a fusional cult of the phallic serpent brought a kind of unity to Naassenism, which was prey to behavioral variations that went from Essene abstinence to the creative love extolled by Simon of Samaria.

According to the Book of the Scolies by the Syrian heresiologue Bar-Konal, this was the poetic cosmogony of the Koukeens:

God was born from the sea situated on the Earth of Light, which they call the Lively Sea. The Sea of Light and the Earth are more ancient than God.

When God was born from the Lively Sea, he sat on the waters, looked at them, and in them saw his own image. He extended his hand, seized (the image), seized it as a companion, was in love with it and would engender with it a crowd of gods and goddesses.

The idea of a God in love with his reflection, with his Spirit, with his Wisdom or Sophia, was not foreign to Judeo-Christian speculations on the nature of the Angelos-Christos.

The position of the Nicolaites appeared closer to Essenism:

The Darkness (the abyss and the waters), rejected by the unengendered Spirit, rises up, furious, to attack it; this struggle produces a kind of matrix that, for the Spirit, engenders four Eons, which engender fourteen more; after which the ‘right’ and ‘left,’ light and darkness, are formed. One of the superior powers emanates from the Spirit, Barbelo, the Celestial Sea, engendered the bad entity (Ialdabaoth or Sabaoth), creator of this lower world; but, repenting, it used its beauty to create salvation, from the inferior cosmos.[123]

A rumor has it that the Nicolaites, a name that comes from a Bishop Nicolas, the governor of their community, were made the object of a polemic to which the Greek text of the Apocalypse attributed to John bears witness. If one remembers that a person with the same name, John, took for himself a Gospel originally derived from a Naassene midrash, it is not improbable that, at the end of the First Century — while the Judeo-Christian philosophers such as Cerinthe, Satornil and the partisans of Saul/Paul confronted each other in Ephesus, Antiochus, Pergame, Alexandria and Corinthe — a program of Esseno-Christian reunification that exluded the old forms of Naassenism was added to the text of the Jewish original. The text of the Revelations (2, 6, and 15–16) notably attacks the Nicolaites who were influential in Ephesus and Pergame, where they seemed to have striven to reconcile Naassenism and Essenism.

In all probability, the Perates constituted a later branch of the Naassenes. In his study of WAW, the Hebraic letter that symbolizes the Messiah, Dupont-Sommers derives their name from the Greek word paratai, the “traversers,” those who cross the waters of corruption.[124] Perhaps they were confused with the Cainites, who, according to the Elenchos, estimated that the serpent was “the sign with which God marked Cain to prevent him from being killed by those who encountered him” (V, 15).

In North Africa, the Naassenes of the Cainite type rallied many adepts around a prophetess named Quintilla. These adepts professed the existence of two divinities. As with Marcion much later, their Demuirge identified himself with YHWH. Cain, as much as the Serpent, is YHWH’s expiatory victory: “The serpent is Cain, whom the God of this world did not agree to offer [as a sacrifice], whereas he agreed to the bloody sacrifice of Abel, because the master of this world pleases himself with blood.”[125]

It is possible that the Cainites of North Africa, who were eventually absorbed by the Christianity of the New Prophecy (which was particularly influential in Carthage around 160–170), were convinced to give to their redeemer the generic name of the God who saves, Joshua/Jesus.

The sect of the Perates, which was perhaps contemporary with [the collation of] the Elenchos, which included them for a long time, witnessed [the birth of] a late and Hellenized Naassenism.

The author of the Elenchos cites two prophets, bishops or founders of communities: Euphrates the Perate and Kelbes the Karystian.

They gave themselves the name Perates because they believed that no creature can escape the destiny that waits for all engendered beings from their birth. Because what is engendered must necessarily corrupt itself [...] We are the only ones to know the necessary laws concerning generation and the road by which man entered the world; the only ones to know exactly how to walk in it and have the power to cross corruption [...] Death seized the Egyptians in the Red Sea with their chariots; the Egyptians are all those who are in ignorance — that is to say, all those who have not received gnosis. The exodus [sortie] from Egypt was the exodus from the body; because the body, according to them, is a little Egypt; to cross the Red Sea is to traverse the waters of corruption, that is to say, Chronos; being from the other side of the Red Sea is to be an upstart [parvenue] from the other side of generation; to arrive in the desert is to find oneself outside of generation, there where the god of perdition and the God of salvation find each other at the same time. The gods of perdition are the stars, which impose on other engendered beings the fatality of a variable generation (Elenchos, V, 16, 1 and 4).[126]

The interpretation that Simon of Samaria applied to the texts of the Bible finds itself here, but made from within the scorn for the body that is common to [all] the religions.

The Redeeming and Perfect Serpent was opposed to the serpents that inoculate [with] death.

It isn’t only the Logos as primordial power issued from the Father who is the Serpent; the diverse powers that rule the terrestrial world are all serpents. Moses called the stars the serpents of the desert, which bite and kill those who want to cross the Red Sea. Also Moses showed to the children of Israel who had been bitten by the serpents in the desert the true and perfect Serpent; those who have faith in him would not be bitten in the desert, that is to say, by the powers. Thus, no one can save nor defend those who left Egypt, that is to say, from the body and this world, if it isn’t the Perfect Serpent that is filled with all plentitude. Those who put in him his hope would not be destroyed by the Serpents of the desert, that is to say, by the gods of generation. This is what is written in the book of Moses. The Serpent is the power that was attached to Moses, the Virgin who changes into a serpent. (*) The serpents of the magicians of Egypt, that is to say, the gods of perdition, resisted the power of Moses. But his rod [verge] overcame them and destroyed them all. The serpent that embraces the universe is the wise Logos of Eve. It is the mystery of Eden; it is the sign with which God marked Cain to prevent him from being killed by anyone who encountered him. The serpent is Cain whom the God of this world would not agree to offer, whereas he agreed to the bloody sacrifice of Abel, because the master of this world takes pleasure in blood. It is the serpent that, in the last days, in the time of Herod, appeared in a human form () in the image of Joseph, who was sold by the hands of his brothers and who was only dressed in a mottled robe. He is in the image of Esau, whose robe received benediction, although he was absent, and who did not receive the blind benediction, but enriched himself from beyond without receiving anything from the blind, whose face Jacob saw ‘as a man sees the face of God’ (Genesis, 33, 10). It is of the serpent that it is said: ‘Like Nemrod the Giant, hunter for the Eternal’ (Genesis, 10, 9). He had many adversaries, and also there were great numbers of serpents who would bite the children of Israel in the desert and whose bites were cured by the Perfect Serpent that Moses would raise in the midst of them [...] It is in his image that the bronze serpent was elevated by Moses in the desert. () He is the only one for whom the celestial constellation is visible everywhere. It is the great ‘beginning’ of which Scripture speaks. It is of him that it is said: In the beginning was the Logos and the Logos was at the side of God and the Logos was God. It was in the beginning at the side of God, all was made by Him and nothing was made without him. What was made by him is life. (*) It is by him that Eve was made, Eve is life. This Eve is ‘the mother of all the living’ (Genesis, 3, 20), nature is common to all, that is to say, the mother of the gods and the angels, the immortals and the mortals, beings without reason and beings endowed with reason (***) (Elenchos, V, 16, 6 sq.).

(*) The serpent as principle of pleasure — defined as perdition by the Perates — was vanquished by the phallic symbolism of the staff of commandment.

(**) The Serpent incarnated in human form is evoked in the Semitic substrata of the Gospel attributed to John, before it — like Melchizedek, Seth or the Master of Justice — assumed the name Joshua/Jesus. The image of the crucified Serpent would be perpetuated in alchemical representations.

(***) Cf. the text of the Gospel attributed to John: “And as Moses raised a serpent in the desert, thus it is necessary that the Son of Man be raised” (3, 14).

(****) Which one finds in the same Gospel (1, 1–3). The Apocryphon of John also shared in this Naassenean or Peratean literature.

(*****) Eve as the principle of life and universal mother was also accredited by the Barbelites.

Facing the Logos, like the serpent standing up straight, matter curls upon itself; it was figured under the symbol of water, which one also encounters among the Naassenes:

Corruption is water and nothing destroys the cosmos as rapidly as water; water extends itself under the spherical form of the world. It is Chronos (understood to be the external planetary sphere of Saturn, that which encloses all the others). It is a power the color of water and, from this power, that is to say, from Chronos, no creature can escape, because it is thanks to Chronos that all creatures incur corruption and no generation has a place that doesn’t have Chronos as an obstacle along its route. It is the meaning of the verse of poetry concerning the gods. ‘I can attest to the earth, the vault of the heavens that cover it and the deadly waters of the Styx. It is the sermon of the immortals gods’ (Odyssey, V, 184 sq.).

The Elenchos quotes a fragment of a Perate hymn:

I am the voice of the awakening in the eternal night. I now begin to deliver the power to control the veils of chaos. The power of the abysmal clay that takes and carries the mold of the eternal and silent humidity; the entire power, always in movement, of the aqueous convulsions that carry what is in repose, retain what flickers, liberate what comes, relieve what reposes, destroy what believes, the loyal guardian of the trace of the airs, she that enjoys what is poured on the order of the twelve eyes, that reveals the Seal to the power that rules the places of the invisible water, the power that has been called the sea. This power, which ignorance has called Chronos, Chronos who was enchained when he closed the trickle of the thick and nebulous, obscene and dark Tartar [River] (Elenchos V, 14, 1–2).

The syncretism of the Perates was not content with harmonizing the Greek and Hebraic mythologies; it incorporated into its doctrine of salvation an astrological speculation, also present in Essenism, as in the Christianities of Bardesane and Priscilla.

The universe and the individual knew an experience subjected to astral influences that the Perates identified with the power of the Archons, agents of the Demiurge. The art of the Serpent-Logos consisted in escaping from it.

In the same way that the stars tend towards the center of the world so as to move away again, thus the entire Creation moves away from its center, the Divinity, so as to make its return. The fall is designated by the left side of circular movement; ascension is on the right side. The heavens themselves offer a great fresco of the combat between the Logos, the Good and Perfect Serpent, and the master of this world, the Bad Serpent. The Logos is figured by the constellation of the Dragon; it has on the right and left sides of its head the Crown and the Lyre. Before the Dragon is kneeling the ‘pitiful’ man, the constellation of Hercules, who touches the end of the right foot of the Dragon. Behind him, the Bad Master of the world, the constellation of the Serpent, approaches so as to ravish the Crown, but the Serpent Eater [Serpentaire] encloses it and prevents it from touching it (Elenchos, V, 16, 14–16).

(The theme of the two serpents is evoked in the Book of Isaiah, 27,1.)

Still later, Ephiphane of Salamine brought to those whom he called “Ophites” a eucharist in honor of the Serpent-Redeemer. Certain sects practice it to this day.

They pile bread on the table; they summon a serpent that they elevate as a sacred animal. One opens the cage, the serpent comes out, gains the table, unfolds itself among the bread and, they say, transforms itself into the Eucharist. Then they break the bread upon which the serpent has crawled and distribute the parts to the communicants. Each one kisses the serpent on the mouth, because the serpent was tamed by the incantation and they prostrate themselves before an identical animal. It is by the serpent, they say, that they send a hymn to the Father on high. Such is their manner of celebrating their mysteries (Epiphanius, Panarion, XXXVII, 5).

From the serpent of the lustful temptation to the Ophis-Christos, passing through the phallic and magic rod of Hermes-Trismegist, the ancient totemism of the animal that coils, interwines, wriggles, penetrates, unites and ejaculates venom or life was spiritualized and entered into religious stereotypes without losing its ambiguous nature.

Uprooted from its original androgyny — which certain Naassenian groups hostile to puritanism celebrated — the ophis was made Redeemer Messiah and Destroyer Messiah, Virgin of iron and terror who reigns over nature, the beasts and women, so as to impose on the world the order of pure renunciation, incarnated in Jesus, and the order of pure repression, incarnated in Satan, the alter ego of the Messiah.

Perhaps it was also through the bias of the Ophis-Christos that the cult of Hermes-Logos that the Greeks called agathephoros, carrier of good (as the agathodaimon), and that offered itself to the popular veneration of the erect phallus, succumbed to a kind of castration.

Whatever it was, Essene asceticism invaded the Greco-Roman world, propagated in it the frenzied taste for continence, mortification and the martryed body, under the antagonistic species of Marcionism and Montanism.

But as much as the rod of Moses was substituted for the “golden staff of Hermes,” the rites of sexual fusion undertook a vivacity sometimes less clandestine than one would suppose, since Epiphanius of Salamis would encounter the Barbelites, who called themselves “Christians,” thereby restoring to the word its sense of “messianist.” Their Messiah did not call himself Jesus, but Barbelo.

At the end of the Fourth Century, Priscilla of Avila would not judge it useless to make it still more precise: “God is not Armaziel, Mariaumne, Joel, Balsamus, nor Barbilon, he is the Christ Jesus” (Corpus eccles. latin., XVIII, 29). Mariaumne was the Mother-Spirit-Sophia-Virgin and Mother of the Naassenes. Barbilon was Barbelo, the spermatophagic and redeeming divinity of the Barbelites.

Justin the Gnostic and the Book of Baruch

Towards the end of the Second Century, Justin the Gnostic — a Greek who was familiar with the Jewish texts and the master of an esoteric school in which instruction was dispensed under the seal of the secret — drafted the Book of Baruch, of which the Elenchos conserved extracts. (It isn’t impossible that Justin frequented the milieu of Kabbalistic Jews who, under the cover of Pharisian obedience, perpetuated and amplified the gnosis of the Hermetic groups of Egypt and Asia Minor.)

The Book of Baruch offers an example of Judeo-Greek syncretism, quite different from that of Justin’s contemporary, Marcion, elaborated by being based on Saul/Paul.

Justin refers to a myth, reported by Herodotus, according to which Heracles made love with a being who was half-young woman, half-serpent, who gave him three children. He drew from this a trinitarian theology:

‘There are three unengendered Principles of the All’: two are masculine, one is feminine. The first masculine principle is called the Good; he is the only one to carry the name and he possesses a universal presence; the second is called the Father of all things, he is deprived of prescience, unknowable and invisible. The feminine principle is also deprived of prescience, it is irascible, it has a double spirit and a double body and absolutely resembles the being from the myth of Herodotus, a young woman up to the sex[ual organs], a serpent above. This young woman also calls herself Eden and Israel. Such are the Principles of the All, the Roots and the sources from which all existence issues; there aren’t any others. The Father saw this half-woman, Eden, fell in love with her, ignorant that she was from the future. This Father calls himself Elohim. Eden fell in love with Elohim, and desire united them in the pleasure of love. From this union, the Father had twelve angels. Here are the names of the twelve angels of the Father: Michael, Amen, Baruch, Gabriel, Esaddea ... (the seven other names are missing from the manuscripts). The names of the maternal angels born to Eden are the following: Babel, Achamoth, Naas, Bel, Belias, Satan, Sael, Adonea, Kanithan, Pharaoth, Karkamenos, and Lathen. Of the twenty-four angels, some (the angels of the Father) serve the Father and do his bidding; the maternal angels serve Eden. The ensemble of these angels form the Paradise of which Moses spoke: God planted a garden towards the East (Genesis, 2, 8), that is to say, opposite Eden, so that Eden would always be able to see Paradise, to know the angels. The angels are allegorically named the trees of this paradise: the Tree of Life is Baruch, the third of the paternal angels; the Tree of the Science of Good and Evil is Naas, the third of the maternal angels. It is thus, he says, that it is necessary to explain the words of Moses; Moses veiled his expression because everyone wasn’t capable of comprehending the truth. When Paradise was constituted by the love of Elohim and Eden, the angels of Elohim prayed a little to the most noble of the earth, that is to say, not the beastial parties of Eden, but the noble regions of the earth, those that are placed below the sex and are similar to man and they made man. The beastial parties serve the savage beasts and the other animals. They made man as a symbol of the amorous union of Elohim and Eden, and they mirrored their powers in him, Eden the soul and Elohim the pneuma. Here is how Adam is like the seal, the pledge of the love and eternal symbol of the wedding of Eden and Elohim. Moreover, Eve was made, as Moses wrote, for being an image and a symbol, so as to conserve in her the imprint of Eden for all eternity. And likewise in the image that Eve is, Eden deposited the soul and Elohim the pneuma. The commandment: ‘Increase and multiply, and fill the world’ (Genesis, 1, 28), that is to say, Eden. Such is the meaning of the Scripture. At his marriage, Eden gave to Elohim all of his power by way of fortune. It is to the example of this first marriage that women, to this day, still give a dowry to their spouses, loyal in this way to the divine law of the first parents, observed the first time by Eden with regard to Elohim. When all was created as Moses describes it, the heavens and the earth and all the creatures that it contained, the twelve angels of the Mother divided themselves into ‘four principles’ and each of these four parties bore the name of a river: Pison, Gihon, Tigress and Euphrates, as it was written by Moses. The dozen angels, distributed among the four groups, wandered the world in every sense and were invested with a lieutenance over the Cosmos by Eden. They never remained in the same place, but, as in a round, they made the rounds, changing place without cease and, at regular intervals, ceding the places that had been attributed to them.

When Pison ruled over a region, famine, distress and tribulations made their appearance, because this group of angels bring with them a period of avarice. Moreover, each part of the world is the theater of plagues and sicknesses that follow the power and nature of the groups that dominate it. This deluge of evil, which varies with the group that dominates, ceaselessly enlaces the universe in its inexhaustable wave, following the decree of Eden. Here is how this fatality of evil is instaurated. After having constructed and fashioned the world through his love affairs, Elohim wanted to regain the superior regions of the heavens to see that nothing was missing from his creation and he took with him his respective angels; because his nature carried him towards the High but wanted to leave Eden here below, because Eden, being earth, did not want to accompany the ascension of her spouse. Reaching to the frontiers of the heavens, Elohim saw a light more powerful than the one he had created; he said, ‘Open for me the doors so that I may enter and praise the Savior; because I have believed in the Savior’ (deformed citation of Psalms, 118, 19). From the heart of the light, a voice responded: ‘Here is the door to the Savior, the just can pass through it’ (ibid., 20). As soon as the door opened, and the Father (Elohim) entered among the Good without his angels and he saw what the eyes do not see, what the ears can not hear and what the heart of man can not conceive. Then to Good said to him: ‘Sit on my right’ (Psalms, 110, 1). But the Father said to the Good: ‘Savior, let me destroy the Cosmos that I created; because my pneuma remains imprisoned in man. I would like to reclaim it.’ The Good responded: ‘Now that you are close to me, you can no longer do evil; by your reciprocal love, you and Eden, you made the world; thus leave Eden to enjoy the creation for as long as it pleases her; as for you, remain close to me.’ Seeing herself abandoned by Elohim, Eden cried to assemble around herself her own angels and dressed herself splendidly in the hope that Elohim would again fall in love with her and re-descend towards her. But Elohim, who found himself under the authority of the Good, did not descend towards Eden. Then the one [Eden] commanded Babel, who is Aphrodite, to provoke the adulterous and divorced men; she had been separated from Elohim: she wanted that the pneuma that dwells in man be tortured by sad separations and suffer, as she herself did from the fact of her abandonment. And Eden gave to Naas, her third angel, a great power and the mission to punish in all ways the pneuma of Elohim that lives in men; she thus punished Elohim in his pneuma because he had abandoned his wife, despite giving his word. The Father Elohim would send Baruch, his third angel, to aid the pneuma that resides in every man. Upon his arrival, Baruch would place himself in the midst of the angels of Eden, that is to say, the milieu of Paradise (because Paradise is the angels in their milieu) and command to the men: ‘You can eat from all the Trees of Paradise, but you can not eat from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Bad,’ which is the serpent, that is to say, you will obey the other eleven angels of Eden, because they carry the passions, they do not carry injustice. The serpent approached Eve, seduced her and committed adultery with her, which is contrary to the Law; then he approached Adam and committed the act of pederasty with him, which is also against the Law. It was from that moment that adultery and pederasty existed. It was from then that evil and good have ruled over men; the two have the same origin, the Father, Elohim. Actually, by elevating himself toward the Good, the Father showed the way to those who would like to climb; by descending toward Eden, he was at the origin of evil for the pneuma that is in man. Baruch was thus sent to Moses and, thanks to Moses, he apprized the children of Israel of the means of returning to the Good. But the third angel of Eden, Naas, who, by the soul issued from Eden, lived by Moses as in all other men, suffocated the prescriptions of Baruch to his own profit. This is why, on the one hand, the soul is subjected to the pneuma and, on the other hand, the pneuma is subjected to the soul. Because the soul is Eden; the pneuma is Elohim; the one and the other find themselves among all the other human beings, men and women. Then Baruch, sent to the prophets so that the pneuma that lives in man could hear the prophets, tore himself away from the bad works of the body, as the Father Elohim had done. This time, Naas, with the help of the soul that, with the pneuma of the Father, lives in man, led the prophets astray; all let themselves to be bribed and they did not obey the words that Elohim had confided to Baruch. Finally, Elohim chose a prophet from the milieu of the uncircumcised and he sent him to combat the twelve angels of Eden and to deliver the Father from the twelve bad angels of the creation. They were the twelve labors of Hercules, labors that he accomplished in order, from the first to the last, by fighting the lion, the hydra, the wild boar, etc. They are here, the names that strangers to the faith have given to the angels to express metaphorically the particular activity of each of the angels of the sea. While he seemed to have succeeded in putting them all down, he banded together with Omphalos, who is none other than Babel, Aphrodite; the one who seduced Hercules and disrobed him of his power, which consisted in the commandments that Elohim had confided to Baruch and she, in exchange, dressed him in her robe, that is to say, in the power of Eden, the power of below. Thus miscarrying the prophetic mission and the labors of Hercules. Finally, in the days of King Herod, Baruch was once again sent here-below by Elohim (Elenchos, V).

The following offers a typical example of interpolation. At the earliest, it dates from the Fourth Century, since Nazareth didn’t exist before that.

Having come to Nazareth, he found there Jesus, the Son of Joseph and Mary, a child of twelve years, occupied with tending his sheep; he revealed to him all of the history of Eden and Elohim since the beginning, thus the future, and he said to him: ‘All the prophets who have come before you have let themselves be seduced; thus tasked [you are] Jesus, Son of Man, with not letting yourself be seduced, but to announce the Word to men, communicate to them the message touching upon the Father and the Good, then climb toward the Good and sit you there, at the side of Elohim, our Father to all.’ Jesus obeyed the angel and said: ‘Savior, I will do all this,’ and he began to preach. Naas also wanted to seduce him but he escaped, because Jesus was loyal to Baruch. Furious with not being able to lead Jesus astray, Naas crucified him. But Jesus would leave on the cross the body of Eden and climbed toward the Good. He said to Eden: ‘Woman, take your son,’ that is to say, the psychical man and the terrestrial man. Then he remitted his pneuma between the hands of the Father and he elevated himself toward the Good (Elenchos, V, 26).

It is with pertinence that Leisegang detected in Justin and his mythology the echoes of an amorous torment, hypostasized as a cosmic drama. I leave the word to the exegetes. Their sympathy for the vindictive man and his antipathy for women accords with the sentimental interest that is witnessed in Justin, showing quite well the sensual origin of all hairesis, of all choices that are supposedly religious or ideological.

The amorous desire and its satisfaction: such is the key to the origin of the world. The disillusions of love and the vengeance that follows them, such is the secret of all evil and egotism that exists on the earth. The entire history of the world and humanity must become a love story. We look for ourselves, we find ourselves, we separate, we torture ourselves, then, finally, faced with a more acute pain, we renounce: here is the eternal mystery of love with the contradiction, intrinsic to love, that makes us desire to be delivered from women and the feminine. All this marks a fine intelligence of the essential differences that separate man and woman. The tragedy of the destiny of the universe begins with the amorous impulse that carries its Creator to quit the domain of the Good. By descending toward Eden, who watches for him, Elohim is charged with the first fault, into which entered a free decision and, at the same time, a natural instinct. If one considers that he left his woman, that he did not descend from the heavens to return to her, that he repented of the consequences of his love and wanted to destroy all that issued from his, his guilt is enormous. Though his conduct had a good appearance, from the angle of the earth, a frightful infidelity was much less culpable than the conduct and the vengeance of Eden, in which she found a partial justification. One thinks of a remark by Nietzsche: ‘That man fears the woman who loves: she will not recoil before any sacrifice, and all the rest will appear to her as without value. That man fears the woman who hates: because man in the depths of his heart is malicious; but the woman is bad’ (Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. G. Bianquis, Paris, Aubier, 1946, p. 153). Eden is malicious: she implements all to thwart the ceaselessly renewed efforts by Elohim to efface the evil issued from him; efforts that will end after millennia of perserverance. Also sympathy is shared between Eden and Elohim. The sadness of God before the fatal consequences of his love and the distress of the deceived woman both aim to awake the sympathy and emotions of the man who, in his poor little existence, lets himself engage in this tragedy of love and have the experience. That Elohim finally realized salvation at the cost of laborious efforts, and that Eden, bent on saying no and impeding the work of the Good, found her tragic end in an eternal abandonment and is no more than a de-spiritualized cadaver: this is the response to the sentiment of justice, which demands the most severe punishment for irreconcilable hatred.[127]

The Adepts of Barbelo

Around 335, the young Epiphanius of Salamis, the future master-thinker of the Church and the author of a list denouncing the heresies, Panarion kata pason ton aireseon (“Medicine against all the heresies”), adhered to a sect that still called itself “Christian,” in the Greek sense of “Messianic.”

Its Christ or Messiah, named Barbelo, who was a modern emanation of the ancient Goddess-Mother, revealed herself under the traits of a Sophia whom would be the exaltation, not of the pneuma in the spiritual sense, but of the breath of life, the sensual power of the body.

Tormented by guilt, and later on converted to the frenzies of asceticism, Epiphanius overwhelmed his first coreligionists with the same indignant rage with which Augustin of Hippone repudiated the Manicheanism of which he had been a zealous partisan.

Among the books that propagated the Barbelite doctrine, Epiphanius cites the Book of Ialdabaoth, the Apocalypse of Adam, the Gospel of Eve, the Book of Seth, the Book of Noria, the Prophecies of Barkabbas (cited by Basilides), the Ascension of Elie, the Nativity of Mary, the Gospel of the Apostles, the Great and Small Interrogations of Mary, the Gospel of Philippe and the Gospel of Perfection.

Several hypotheses have been put forth concerning the name of the Goddess. For Leisegang, it derived from the Hebrew Barbhe Eloha, “in four is God,” an allusion to the divine tetrad, not the tetragrammaton YHWH, but the ancient Semitic celestial group: El the Father, the Mother, his wife, their sons and daughter, who became Father, feminine pneuma, Son, Messiah or Christ. Others see in it a deformation of baal Belo or the cult of the divinity Bel, issued from the rites of fecundity and light, still vital in Samaria despite the Yahwehist implantation, nay, an emancipation from Anath. In the Book of Baruch by Justin the Gnostic, the entity Babbel is identified with Aphrodite.

According to the report made by Epiphanius: “They adore a certain Barbelo who lives, they say, in the eighth heaven and who issued from the Father. She is, according to some, the mother of Ialdabaoth, according to others, the mother of Sabaoth. Her son exercises over the seventh heaven a tyrannical authority and says to her subjects: ‘I am the Eternal and there isn’t any other; there isn’t any other God except for me’” (Panarion, XXV, 2 sq.).

The tyrannical Eternal is none other than YHWH, the God of the Judeans, identified by anti-Judean Jewish gnosis and then by Hellenic gnosis with the Demiurge, the bloody God, popularized under the name Ialdabaoth or Sabaoth; he presides over the destinies of the irremediably bad world. That YHWH-Ialdabaoth was the son of the Goddess-Mother here recalls the eviction of the cults of the Woman and Mother by the patriarchy that acceded to power with neolithic agriculture.

By understanding such words, Barbelite mythology says, the mother of the divine despot decided to save humanity from the miserable lot to which God reduced it. How did she resolve to restore the power that an odious son has stripped away? By ruse and seduction. She presented herself to the Archons, the servants of the Savior, in the voluptuous majesty of her femininity and, having excited their desires, received their sperm “so as to thus restore her power, disseminated in different beings” (Panarion, XXV, 2 sq).

The faithful to Barbelo thus imitated the saving gesture of the Goddess and, with the good conscience of an offering, abandoned themselves to the pleasure of making flow — in place of the blood that so many religions shed — the sperm and the cyprine of which the emission revives the energy of the Natura Magma.

In a passage that much later would inspire the inquisitors who accused the Cathar and Vaudois ascetics of debauchery, Epiphanius reports the use of a sign of recognition, attested to by the Messalians, Beghards and Beguines, and which — before the hedonist fashion of sexual liberties of the Twentieth Century — was long perpetuated among the young people, who indicated, by a caress in the palm of the hand, the imperious character of their desire:

They have, from men to women and from women to men, a sign of recognition that consists, when they give their hands so as to greet each other, in practicing a kind of tickling in the palm of the hand if the new-comer belongs to their religion. As soon as they recognize each other, they have a banquet. They serve delicious food, eat meat and drink wine, even the poor ones. When they have banqueted well, and have, if I may say so, filled their veins with a surplus of power, they move on to debauchery. The man leaves his place at the side of his woman by saying to her: ‘Raise yourself and accomplish the love feast [agape] with the brother.’

The Christian Churches claiming Thomas for themselves allowed an amorous relation between Jesus and Salome: “Salome said: ‘Who are you, man; from whom do you (issue) to be on top of my bed and to have eaten at my table?’” (Logion, 65, the Hidden Words that Jesus the Living said to Didyne Jude Thomas, popularly known under the title Gospel of Thomas). In the same order of ideas, the First Epistle attributed to John (3, 9) declares: “Whomever is born from God does not commit sin, because the sperm of God lives in him; and he can not sin because he is born from God. From this one can recognize the children of God and the children of the Devil.”

The man and the woman take care to receive the sperm between their hands and they pledge it to the Goddess-Mother so that she can fortify life in the world and also in them.

The sect frequented by Epiphanius offers an example of an archaic belief of the orgiastic type that was degraded by successive syncretisms; even the Christianity erected since Nicaea as the religion of the State was impregnated by the currents in which it was at first formulated before being decanted as a political and theological doctrine. Many tendencies fundamentally hostile to Christianity would survive by adapting themselves with more or less flexibility to the norms imposed by Rome (the recuperation of the Celtic or Slavic mythologies, incorporated into the cult of the saints is in this regard exemplary, as Robert Graves has shown).[128]

In the case of the Barbelites, tardily denounced by Epiphanius, perhaps communion of the Christian type replaced the homage formerly rendered to the “breath of life,” such that it strongly expressed amorous pleasure. As Leisegang recalls, “the word pneuma is immediately tied to the evocation of a spermatic, genesic [genesique] matter. At the beginning, the pneuma had absolutely nothing to do with spirit; it was the ‘wind,’ is was a ‘hot air.’ The conception following which it is a pneuma-wind, and not a pneuma-spirit, which engenders human life, is encountered in the Greek tradition...”[129]

In the idea of a sperma, generator of life, of a substance that creates man and the world, is not absent from the Greek translation of “Spirit” by pneuma, such as it appears in the Old and New Testaments, but, little by little, it obliterated the most unacceptable elements for a society dominated by religion: the act of self-creation, the creation of the world and aleatorily of the child that conceals in its substance the amorous union of man and woman. The masked reality ironically resurgent among the few playful stoics and the voluntarily castrated Origen under the traits of the logos spermatikos became, in Saint-Sulpician imagery, the language of fire in the Pentecost.

As for the Barbelites, man and woman possessed in their own semen the pneuma, the breath of God. And the individual approaches the divine essence all the more that he or she irradiates from his or her spermatic power and the dispensation of a fusional orgasm.

“To unite oneself with God,” Leisegang specifies, “one must mix and melt one’s semen with the generating substance of the All. Salvation consists in removing one’s semen from terrestrial destination and leading it back to the celestial source of all semen.”[130]

Here is what Epiphanius of Salamis reports about the group in which was an adept:

They offer to the Father, to the Nature of the All, what they have in their hands by saying: ‘We offer to you this gift, the body of the Christ.’ Then they eat it and commune in their own ignominy, by saying: ‘Here is the body of the Christ, here is the Easter for which our bodies suffer and are constrained to confess the passion of the Christ.’ They moreover do it with the menses of the woman. They gather the blood of impurity and commune in the same way. And they say: ‘Here is the blood of the Christ.’ When they read in the Revelations ‘I see a tree that has twelve times the fruit of the year, and it says to me: it is the tree of life,’ they allegorically interpret it as the flux of menstrual blood of the woman.

Epiphanius did not understand or didn’t want to understand that the Christ, the Messiah of the Barbelites, is not Joshua/Jesus, but Barbelo, whom Priscilla would call Barbilon.

When Barbelo gave birth to the odious breed of the Eternal — YHWH-Ialdabaoth-Sabaoth (also called Kalakau) — she revoked her status as mother so as to be celebrated as the woman impregnated by the pleasure and love that she dispenses. Also the Barbelites resorted to a form of voluntary interruption of pregnancy, which didn’t lack salt:

When one among them, by surprise, has let his semen penetrate too early and the woman is pregnant, listen to what they make still more abominable. They extirpate the embryo as soon as they can seize it with their fingers, they take this runt, crush it in a kind of mortar, mix in it honey, pepper and different condiments, as well as perfumed oils, so as to conjure up distaste, then they reunite themselves [...] and each communes with his fingers in this runt paste. The human meal completed, they conclude with this prayer to God: ‘We have not allowed the Archon of voluptuousness to play with us, but we have corrected the error of the Father.’ This is, to their eyes, the perfect Easter [...] Then, in their meetings, they enter into ecstasy, they smear their hands with [...] their seminal emmissions, they extend them and, their hands thus sullied and their bodies entirely naked, they pray to obtain through this action free access to God. Men and women, they polish their bodies day and night with salves, baths and spices, and they devote themselves to sleep and drinking. They curse someone who is fasting by saying: ‘It is not necessary to abstain, because fasting is the work of the Archon that created Eon. (*) It is, on the conrary, necessary to nourish oneself so that bodies are powerful and capable of carrying fruit in their time’ (**) (Panarion, XXVI, 4–5).

(*) That is to say, the God who created the world (the Eon). The expression “Eon” is frequently found in the letters presumed to have been written by Paul, but the translators unfailingly made it their duty to render it as “world,” “century,” or “epoch,” so as to avoid the Gnostic connotation.

(**) The Gospel of the Egyptians also justifies the refusal to engender children: “And Marie-Salome demanded of the Savior: ‘Master, when will the reign of Death end?’ And Jesus responded: ‘When you women no longer make babies... When you have deposed the garments of shame and ignominy, when the two become one, when the male and the female become one, when there is no longer man or woman, that’s when the reign of Death will end...’ Salome responded: ‘Have I thus done well, Master, by not being a mother?’ And Jesus said: ‘Eat all the fruits, but from what is bitter (maternity), do not eat anything’” (quoted by Clement of Alexandria, Stromates, III, IX, 66, and by the Second Epistle to the Church of Corinthe attributed to Clement).

In what it presents of the most radical, the Barbelite doctrine was related to the teachings of Simon of Samaria: the body is the earth of which the creative power merits the exclusive attention of men. The goal is the fusion of the me and the world, but, whereas Simon identified the consciousnesness of pleasure and the consciousness of self-creation, the Barbelites, obeying the religious solicitation, ended in a mystical vision of pleasure that, in the last instance, is an homage to the soma of the Spirit and the divine.

Barbelo, orgiastic Goddess and sucker of the universal sperm, turns — as in Tantrism — the pleasures of life into a celestial duty, voluptuousness into ritual obligation. Therefore the ignoble is not sensuality consumed as communion in sperm and abnormal excitability [erethisme], but the amorous exaltation is travestied as an ejaculation of the sacred.

The Barbelite religion fomented a theology quite anterior to that which Catholicism would impose after Nicaea.

Two forces were opposed: the Good God, of whom Barbelo is the emanation, and the God who created the bad world. By the road of orgasm, Barbelo led man back to the Kingdom of Light, from which the Demiurge was exiled so as to enthralled it to its odious authority.

In the beginning was the Darkness, the Abysss and the Water; the pneuma was among them and separated one from the other. But the Darkness became angry and grumbled about the Spirit; it advanced but the pneuma seized it and impregnated a being by the name of metra (matrix). Once born, this being was impregnated by the same pneuma. From the matrix came four Eons, from the four Eons came fourteen others and there was a left and a right matrix, Light and Darkness. Much later, after all those who preceded it, there appeared a deformed Eon; this united with the metra that manifested itself in the heights and it is from this frightful Eon that originally came the Gods, angels, demons and the seven spirits (Panarion, XXV, 5).

The Book of Noria — who is no longer a daughter of Adam, as among the Ophites, but the wife of Noah — recounts that Noria did not enter the Ark, because she wanted to kill the Creator of this world with the rest of humanity: because she did not serve this Creator but the superior powers and Barbelo, the enemy of the Archon. Three times Noria set fire to the Ark; from which it is necessary to conclude that ‘what was stolen from the Mother of the heights by the Archon who created this world and the other gods, angels and demons, we must gather together from the power that is in the body, by means of the seminal emissions of man and woman’ (Panarion, XXVI, 1, 8–9).

It is in the Gospel of Eve that the fusional aspiration of the Barbelites appears with an astonishing poetry, this identity of the me and the world that offers in the flash of pleasure the irradiating presence of love:

I hold myself on a high mountain and I see a man of great stature and another, reduced [rabougri] (it is a question of the Good God and Barbelo, shriveled and decreased by the fear of its power), and I heard as a voice of thunder, and I advanced so as to listen and it said to me:

I am you and you are me
and where you are, I am,
and in all things I am inseminated.
And if you want it, you can gather me together
And if you gather me together, you gather yourself together, as well

(Panarion, XXVI, 3, 11).