stitutes their importance in
the history of secret societies.

Whether the Gnostics themselves can be described as a secret society, or
rather as a ramification of secret societies, is open to question. M.
Matter, quoting a number of third-century writers, shows the possibility
that they had mysteries and initiations; the Church Fathers definitely
asserted this to be the case.[120] According to Tertullian, the
Valentinians continued, or rather perverted, the mysteries of Eleusis,
out of which they made a "sanctuary of prostitution."[121]

The Valentinians are known to have divided their members into three
classes--the Pneumatics, the Psychics, and the Hylics (i.e.
materialists); the Basilideans are also said to have possessed secret
doctrines known to hardly one in a thousand of the sect. From all this
M. Matter concludes that:

1. The Gnostics professed to hold by means of tradition a secret
doctrine superior to that contained in the public writings of the
apostles.

2. That they did not communicate this doctrine to everyone....

3. That they communicated it by means of emblems and symbols, as
the Diagram of the Ophites proves.

4. That in these communications they imitated the rites and trials
of the mysteries of Eleusis.[122]

This claim to the possession of a secret oral tradition, whether known
under the name of [Greek: gnosis] or of Cabala, confirms the conception
of the Gnostics as Cabalists and shows how far they had departed from
Christian teaching. For if only in this idea of "one doctrine for the
ignorant and another for the initiated," the Gnostics had restored the
very system which Christianity had come to destroy.[123]

Manicheism

Whilst we have seen the Gnostic sects working for more or less
subversive purposes under the guise of esoteric doctrines, we find in
the Manicheans of Persia, who followed a century later, a sect
embodying the same tendencies and approaching still nearer to secret
society organization.

Cubricus or Corbicius, the founder of Manicheism, was born in Babylonia
about the year A.D. 216. Whilst still a child he is said to have been
bought as a slave by a rich widow of Ctesiphon, who liberated him and on
her death left him great wealth. According to another story--for the
whole history of Manes rests on legends--he inherited from a rich old
woman the books of a Saracen named Scythianus on the wisdom of the
Egyptians. Combining