"But I, O Philip, will not endure thee, because thou hast swallowed up the men in the abyss; but behold My Spirit is in them, and I will bring them up from the dead; and thus they, seeing thee, shall believe in the Glory of Him that sent thee. "And the Saviour having turned, stretched up His hand, and marked a Cross in the Air coming down from Above even unto the Abyss, and it was full of Light, and had its form after the likeness of a ladder. And all the multitude that had gone down from the City into the Abyss came up on the Ladder of the Cross of Light; but there remained below the proconsul and the viper which these worshipped. And when the multitude had come up, having looked upon Philip hanging head downwards, they lamented with great lamentation at the lawless action which they had done." The doers of the "lawless" deed are the same as the "lawless Jews" in the _Acts of John_--"those who are under the law of the lawless Serpent"; that is to say, those who are under the sway of Generation, as contrasted with those under the law of Re-generation (see _Hymn of Jesus_, pp. 28, 47). Philip stands for the man learning the last lesson of divine mercy. The Proconsul and the Viper are the antitypes of the Saviour and the Serpent of Wisdom. The crucifixion of Philip is, however, not the same as the crucifixion of the Christ; he is hanged reversed, his head to the earth and not towards heaven. It is a lower grade of the mysteries. Concerning the mystery of the crucifixion of the Christ we learn somewhat of its inner nature from the doctrines of the Docetæ. His baptism was on this wise: He washed Himself in the Jordan, that is the Stream of the Logos, and after His purification in the Life-giving Water, He became possessed of a spiritual or perfect body, the type and signature of which were in accordance with the matter of his virginity, that is of virgin substance; so that when the World-ruler, or God of generation or death, condemned his own plasm, the physical body, to death, that is to the Cross, the soul nourished in that physical body might strip off the body of flesh, and nail it to the "tree," and yet triumph over the powers of the Ruler and not be found naked, but clothed in a robe of glory. Hence the saying: "Except a man be born of Water and the Spirit he cannot enter into the Kingship of the Heavens; that which is born of the flesh is flesh." (_F._, p. 221). It was because of these and such like ideas, and in the conviction that the mystery of the crucifixion was to be worked out in every man, that a Gnostic writer, following the Valentinian tradition, explains a famous passage in the Pauline _Letter to the Ephesians_ as follows: