Chapter 1360

[←1351]

Compare with these “pairs of opposites,” in the Anugîtâ, the “pairs” of Æons, in the elaborate system of Valentinus, the most learned and profound Master of the Gnosis. As the “pairs of opposites,” male and female, are all derived from Âkâsha (undeveloped and developed, differentiated and undifferentiated, or Self or Prajâpati), so are the Valentinian “pairs” of male and female Æons shown to emanate from Bythos, the preëxisting eternal Depth, and in their secondary emanation from Ampsiu-Ouraan, or sempiternal Depth and Silence, the second Logos. In the Esoteric emanation there are seven chief “pairs of opposites”; and so also in the Valentinian system there were fourteen, or twice seven. Epiphanius “copied one pair twice over,” Mr. C. W. King thinks, “and thus adds one pair to the proper fifteen.” (The Gnostics and their Remains, pp. 263, 264.) Here King falls into the opposite error; the pairs of Æons are not 15 (a “blind”) but 14, as the first Æon is That from which others emanate, Depth and Silence being the first and only emanation from Bythos. As Hippolytus shows: “The Æons of Valentinus are confessedly the six Radicals of Simon (Magus),” with the seventh, Fire, at their head. And these are: Mind, Intelligence, Voice, Name, Reason and Thought, subordinate to Fire, the Higher Self, or precisely the “Seven Winds” or the “Seven Priests” of Anugîtâ.