Irenaeus also gives the names of the later “heavens, virtues, powers, angels, and builders” as being respectively Iao, Sabaoth, Adonai, Eloaeus, Oreus, and Astaphaeus or Astanpheus, which agrees with the Ophite document or Diagram to be presently mentioned[166]. The first four of these names are too evidently the names given in the Old Testament to Yahweh for us to doubt the assertion of the Fathers that by Ialdabaoth the Ophites meant the God of the Jews[167]. The last two names, Oreus and Astaphaeus, Origen also asserts to be taken from the art of magic, and may be supposed to have some connection with fire and water respectively[168]. It is probable that the later Ophites identified all these seven heavens with the seven astrological “planets,” _i.e._ Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, the Sun, Venus, Mercury and the Moon in probably that order[169]. How now did the earth on which we live come into being? The primitive Babylonians, whose ideas and culture were at a very early date spread over the whole of Asia Minor, conceived the earth not as a globe but as a circular boat like the ancient coracle, over which the heavens stretched like a canopy or hemisphere[170]. Hence we must regard these heavens of the planetary powers, Ialdabaoth and his progeny, as a series of covers fitting one within the other like, in the words of the Fathers, “juggling cups,” or to take another simile, the successive skins of an onion. The earth stretched below these, but was at the stage of creation at which we have arrived really without form and void, being the formless waste of waters which covered the denser darkness and chaos. The ordered shape which it afterwards assumed and which we now see, was, in the Ophite story, the result of the fall of no deity, angel, or heavenly power, but of Man. Irenaeus’ account of this Second Fall is that the six powers descended from Ialdabaoth began to quarrel with their progenitor for supremacy—an idea which perhaps is to be referred either to the Jewish tradition of the revolt of the angels or with more likelihood to the astrological ideas about the benefic and malefic planets[171]. This so enraged him that he glared in his wrath upon the underlying dregs of matter, and his thought (ἔννοια) implanted there took birth and shape[172]. This fresh son of his was possessed of a quality of the possession of which he himself had never given any evidence, and was called Nous or Intelligence like the male of Simon’s first syzygy or pair of roots. But he was said to be of serpent form (ὀφιόμορφος) because, as says the Naassene or Ophite author quoted by Hippolytus, “the serpent is the personification of the watery element,” and therefore, perhaps, the symbol of that external ocean which the ancients thought surrounded the inhabited world[173]. It seems more probable, however, that the Ophites were compelled to introduce this form because the serpent was worshipped everywhere in Asia Minor as the