Jesus then began to heal the sick, to announce the unknown Father, and to reveal Himself as the Son of the first man. This angered the princes of the planetary worlds and their progenitor, Ialdabaoth, who contrived that He should be killed. As He was being led away for this purpose, Christos with Sophia left Him for the incorruptible aeon[213] or highest heaven. Jesus was crucified; but Christos did not forget Him and sent a certain power to Him, who raised Him in both a spiritual and psychic body, sending the worldly parts back into the world. After His Resurrection, Jesus remained upon earth eighteen months, and perception descending into Him taught what was clear. These things He imparted to a few of his disciples whom He knew to be capable of receiving such great mysteries, and He was then received into heaven. Christos sate down at the night hand of Ialdabaoth that he might, unknown to this last, take to himself the souls of those who have known these mysteries, after they have put off their worldly flesh. Thus Ialdabaoth cannot in future hold holy souls that he may send them down again into the age [_i.e._ this aeon]; but only those which are from his own substance, that is, which he has himself breathed into bodies. When all the sprinkling of light is thus collected, it will be taken up into the incorruptible aeon. The return to Deity will then be complete, and matter will probably be destroyed. In any case, it will have lost the light which alone gives it life[214]. What rites or form of worship were practised by these Ophites we do not know, although Epiphanius preserves a story that they were in the habit of keeping a tame serpent in a chest which at the moment of the consecration of their Eucharist was released and twined itself round the consecrated bread[215]. Probably the very credulous Bishop of Constantia was misled by some picture or amulet depicting a serpent with his tail in its mouth surrounding an orb or globe which represents the mundane egg of the Orphics. In this case the serpent most likely represented the external ocean which the ancients thought surrounded the habitable world like a girdle. But the story, though probably untrue, is some evidence that the later Ophites used, like all post-Christian Gnostics, to practise a ceremony resembling the Eucharist, and certainly administered also the rite of baptism which is alluded to above in the tale of the descent of Christos. Hippolytus also tells us that they used to sing many hymns to the First Man; and he gives us a “psalm” composed by them which, as he thinks, “comprehends all the mysteries of their error[216].” Unfortunately in the one text of the _Philosophumena_ which we have, it is given in so corrupt a form that the first German editor declared it to be incapable of restoration. It may perhaps be translated thus: