marked in the old Egyptian religion from which, if I am right, Valentinus drew his phraseology. All that we can say, therefore, with certainty as to Valentinus’ views regarding the Godhead is that he believed it manifested itself in three successive stages of emanation. The most convincing proof that this was the fundamental point of his teaching can perhaps be found in the manner in which Hippolytus, at the end of his account of it, drags in the second epistle of Plato about the Good Source of All and its secondary and tertiary developments as evidence of Valentinus’ Platonizing.[100] The other great and distinguishing feature of Valentinus’ teaching was the story of Sophia. This is found in no other heresy but the Ophite, where it takes a form so much grosser and coarser than that of Valentinus as to betray its connection with the myths current in Western Asia long before our Era; and I have before suggested that it was probably from Ophite sources that Valentinus constructed his story. In doing so, he refined it, and instead of making Sophia’s fall from the Godhead a mere accident, he portrayed it as the result of disobedience and emulation, while her eventual return thereto was the result of her repentance. That the Demiurge or Architect of the Universe was brought into being by her, and that Matter is his creation, while the Divine spark in man comes from Sophia Without, who in her turn depends upon the Sophia within the Pleroma, appears plainly from a “psalm” by Valentinus himself quoted by Hippolytus.[101] We see, then, that the fundamental points of Valentinus’ teaching were the manifestation of the Godhead in three successive stages, the story of Sophia’s Fall through error and her restoration by repentance, and the dependence of the lower and more material parts of the Universe upon the higher ones. We shall see later that these are also the foundations of the system disclosed in the earlier documents of the _Pistis Sophia_.