We come to the creation of man which the Ophites attributed to the act of Ialdabaoth and the other planetary powers, and represented as taking place not on the earth, but in some one or other of the heavens under their sway[182]. According to Irenaeus—here our only authority—Ialdabaoth boasted that he was God and Father, and that there was none above him[183]. His mother Sophia or Prunicos, disgusted at this, cried out that he lied, inasmuch as there was above him “the Father of all, the First Man and the Son of Man[184]”; and that Ialdabaoth was thereby led on the counsel of the serpent or Ophiomorphus to say, “Let us make man in our own image[185]!” Here the Greek or older text of Irenaeus ends, and our only remaining guide is the later Latin one, which bears many signs of having been added to from time to time by some person more zealous for orthodoxy than accuracy. Such as it is, however, it narrates at a length which compares very unfavourably with the brevity and concision of the statements of the Greek text, that Ialdabaoth’s six planetary powers on his command and at the instigation of Sophia formed an immense man who could only writhe along the ground until they carried him to Ialdabaoth who breathed into him the breath of life, thereby parting with some of the light that was in himself; that man “having thereby become possessed of intelligence (Nous) and desire (Enthymesis) abandoned his makers and gave thanks to the First Man”; that Ialdabaoth on this in order to deprive man of the light he had given him created Eve out of his own desire; that the other planetary powers fell in love with her beauty and begot from her sons who are called angels; and finally, that the serpent induced Adam and Eve to transgress Ialdabaoth’s command not to eat of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge[186]. On their doing so, he cast them out of Paradise, and threw them down to this world together with the serpent or Ophiomorphus. All this was done by the secret contrivance of Sophia, whose object throughout was to win back the light and return it to the highest world whence it had originally come. Her manner of doing so seems to have been somewhat roundabout, for it involved the further mingling of light with matter, and even included the taking away by her of light from Adam and Eve when turned out of Paradise and the restoring it to them when they appeared on this earth—a proceeding which gave them to understand that they had become clothed with material bodies in which their stay would be only temporary[187]. Cain’s murder of Abel was brought about by the same agency, as was the begettal of Seth, ancestor of the existing human race. We further learn that the serpent who was cast down got under him the angels begotten upon Eve by the planetary powers, and brought into existence six sons who, with himself, form “the seven earthly demons.” These are the adversaries of mankind, because it was on account of man that