that they should be gathered up for
mysteries in a most filthy collection; that these were the
mysteries of life, and of the most perfect Gnosis--a practice which
anyone who has understanding from God would most naturally consider
to be most filthy conduct and death rather than life. And he
supposes names for the Dominions and Principalities, and says there
are different heavens, and sets forth Powers for each firmament and
heaven, and tricks them out with barbarous names, and says that no
man can be saved in any other fashion than by learning this
mystagogy, and how to offer such sacrifices to the Universal Father
through these Dominions and Principalities. And he says that this
world (aeon) was constructed defectively by Dominions and
Principalities of evil. And he considers that corruption and
destruction are of the flesh alone, but that there is a
purification of souls and that, only if they are established in
initiation by means of his misleading Gnosis. This is the beginning
of the so-called Gnostics. And he pretended that the Law was not of
God, but of the left-hand Power, and that the Prophets were not
from the Good God but from this or the other Power. And he lays it
down for each of them as he pleases: the Law was of one, David of
another, Isaiah of another, Ezekiel again of another, and ascribes
each of the Prophets to some one Dominion. And all of them were
from the left-hand Power and outside the Perfection,[49] and every
one that believed in the _Old Testament_ was subject to death.

5. But this doctrine is overturned by the truth itself. For if he
were the Great Power of God, and the harlot with him the Holy
Spirit, as he himself says, let him say what is the name of the
Power or in what word[50] he discovered the epithet for the woman
and nothing for himself at all. And how and at what time is he
found at Rome successively paying back his debt, when in the midst
of the city of the Romans the miserable fellow fell down and died?
And in what scripture did Peter prove to him that he had neither
lot nor share in the heritage of the fear of God? And could the
world not have its existence in the Good God, when all the good
were chosen by him? And how could it be a left-hand Power which
spake in the Law and Prophets, when it has preached t