Probably one of the first changes to take place in the Ophite faith was the withdrawal into the background of the serpent worship which respect for the ancient cults of Asia Minor had imposed upon the earlier members of the sect. In the diagram, Ophiomorphus does not seem to have been depicted in his proper shape, although he may perhaps be identified with the Leviathan there shown as surrounding the terrestrial world. Those Ophites who wished to obtain proselytes among Christian catechumens no doubt felt the advisability of not insisting upon this conception, inasmuch as “the serpent” was the figure under which the Oriental Christians loved to allude to the Pagan worships which still opposed them in Asia Minor[265]. Hence there arose much confusion among the Ophites themselves as to the character of the serpent, and while some, according to Irenaeus, asserted that Sophia the mother of Ialdabaoth herself became the serpent[266], Theodoret, a very late witness, thinks that the Ophites of his time held that Ophiomorphus, although originally the minister of Sophia, had gone over to the other side, and had become the enemy of mankind[267]. In this we may also, perhaps, see, if we will, the effect of Egyptian influence upon the earlier Ophite teaching; for in Egypt, the serpent Apep was always looked upon as the enemy of Râ, the Sun-god, who was rightly considered the great benefactor of humanity. It is no doubt due to the same influence that in one of the documents of the _Pistis Sophia_—one part of which, as will be seen later, was probably written for the furtherance of a late form of the Ophite heresy—the serpent, while keeping his place in the Cosmos as the great ocean which surrounds the earth, is transformed into the outer darkness of the Canonical Gospels, and described as a huge torture-chamber for the punishment of souls[268]. The same document shows us how the Ophites, while adopting all the ideas of their predecessors the Orphics as to the respective states of the initiated and uninitiated after death,—including therein their reincarnation, the draught from the lake of memory and the like—contrived to mix with them the current astrological ideas of the time which made all these events happen in an order determined by the motions of the stars[269]. This tendency, already visible in Hippolytus’ time in the Ophite sect which he calls the Peratae[270], will, however, be better considered when we come to deal with the documents of the _Pistis Sophia_ themselves.