[Footnote 215: These words appear in the MS. at the foot of this Book.] BOOK V THE OPHITE HERESIES [Sidenote: p. 137.] 1. These are the contents of the 5th (book) of the Refutation of all Heresies. 2. What the Naassenes say who call themselves Gnostics, and that they profess those opinions which the philosophers of the Greeks and the transmitters of the Mysteries first laid down, starting wherefrom they have constructed heresies. 3. And what things the Peratæ imagine, and that their doctrine is not framed from the Holy Scriptures but from the astrological (art). 4. What is the system according to the Sithians, and that they have patched together their doctrine by plagiarizing from those wise men according to the Greeks, (to wit) Musæus and Linus and Orpheus. 5. What Justinus imagined and that his doctrine is not framed from the Holy Scriptures, but from the marvellous tales of Herodotus the historiographer. 1. _Naassenes._[1] [Sidenote: p. 138.] 6. I consider that the tenets concerning the Divine and the fashioning of the cosmos (held by) all those who are deemed philosophers by Greeks and Barbarians have been very painfully set forth in the four books before this. Whose curious arts I have not neglected, so that I have undertaken for the readers no chance labour, exhorting many to love of learning and certainty of knowledge about the truth. Now therefore there remains to hasten on to the refutation of the heresies, with which intent[2] also we have set forth the things aforesaid. From which philosophers the heresiarchs have taken hints in common[3] and patching like cobblers the mistakes of the ancients on to their own thoughts, have offered them as new to those they can deceive, as we shall prove in (the books) which follow. For the rest, it is time to approach the subjects laid down before, but to begin with those who have dared to sing the praises of the Serpent, who is in fact the cause of the error, through certain systems invented by his action. Therefore [Sidenote: p. 139.] the priests and chiefs of the doctrine were the first who were called Naassenes, being thus named in the Hebrew tongue: for the Serpent is called Naas.[4] Afterwards they called themselves Gnostics alleging that they alone knew the depths.[5] Separating themselves from which persons, many men have made the heresy, which is really one, a much divided affair, describing the same things according to varying opinions, as this discourse will argue as it proceeds. These men worship as the beginning of all things, according to their own statement, a Man and a Son of Man. But this Man is masculo-feminine[6] and is called by them Adamas;[7] and hymns to him are many and various. And [Sidenote: p. 140.] the hymns, to cut it short, are repeated by them somehow like this:--