Of the _Gnostics_, Mr. Gerald Massey speaks as follows: “The ancient wisdom of Egypt and Chaldea lived on with the men who knew, called the Gnostics. They had directly inherited the gnosis that remained oral, the sayings uttered from mouth to ear that were to be unwritten, the mysteries performed in secret, the science kept concealed. The continuity of the astronomical mythos of Equinoctial Christolatry and of the total typology is proved by the persistence of the type—the ancient genitrix, the two sisters, the hebdomad of inferior and superior powers, the trinity in unity represented by _Iao_ the tetrads male and female, the double Horus, or Horus and Stauros, the system of Æôns, the Karaite divinities, Harpocrates and Sut-Anubis, Isis and Hathor. Theirs was the Christ not made flesh, but the manifester of the seven powers and perfect star of the pleroma. The figure of eight, which is a sign of the Nnu or associate gods in Egypt, who were the primary Ogdoad, is reproduced as a gnostic symbol, a figure of the pleroma and fellow-type of the eight-rayed star. The ‘Lamb of God’ was a gnostic sign. ‘Lord, thou art the Lamb’ (and ‘our Light’) was a gnostic formula. The ‘Immaculate Virgin’ was a gnostic type. On one of the sard stones Isis stands before Serapis holding the sistrum in one hand, in the other a wheatsheaf, the legend being ‘Immaculate is our Lady Isis,’ which proves the continuity from Kam. “It was gnostic art that reproduced the Hathor-Meri and Horus of Egypt as the Virgin and child-Christ of Rome, and the icons of characters entirely ideal which served as the sole portraits of the _historical_ Madonna and Jesus the Christ. The report of Irenæus sufficed to show the survival of the true tradition. He complains of the oral wisdom of the Gnostics, and says rightly they read from things unwritten—i. e. from sources unknown to him and the Fathers in general. Chief of these sources was the science of astronomy. He testifies that Marcus was skilled in this form of the gnosis, and enables us to follow the line of unbroken continuity, and to confute his own assertion that Gnosticism had no existence prior to Marcion and Valentinus; which shows he did not know, or else he denied the fact, that the Suttites, the Mandaites, the Essenes, and Nazarenes were all Gnostics; all of which sects preceded the cult of the carnalized Christ. Hippolytus informs us that Elkesai said the Christ born of a Virgin was _œonian_. The Elkesites maintained that Jesus the Christ had continually transformed and manifested in various bodies at many different times. This shows they also were in possession of the gnosis, and that the Christ and his repeated incarnations were Kronian. Hence we are told that they occupied themselves ‘with a bustling activity in regard to astronomical science.’ Epiphanius also bears witness that the head and front of the gnostic boast was astronomy, and that Manes wrote a work on astronomy, astronomy