All this we knew before the discovery of our text from the statements of heresiologists like St. Irenæus and Epiphanius; but Hippolytus goes further than any other author by connecting these Ophite theories with the worship of the Mother of the Gods or Cybele, the form under which the triune deity of Western Asia was best known in Europe. The unnamed Naassene or Ophite author from whom he quotes without intermission throughout the chapter, seems to have got hold of a hymn to Attis used in the festivals of Cybele, in which Attis is, after the syncretistic fashion of post-Alexandrian paganism, identified with the Syrian Adonis, the Egyptian Osiris, the Greek Dionysos and Hermes, and the Samothracian or Cabiric gods Adamna and Corybas; and the chapter is in substance a commentary on this hymn, the order of the lines of which it follows closely. This commentary tries to explain or “interpret” the different myths there referred to by passages from the Old and New Testaments and from the Greek poets dragged in against their manifest sense and in the wildest fashion. Most of these supposed allusions, indeed, can only be justified by the most outrageous play upon words, and it may be truly said that not a single one of them when naturally construed bears the slightest reference to the matter in hand. Yet they serve not only to elucidate the Ophite beliefs, but give, as it were accidentally, much information as to the scenes enacted in the Eleusinian and other heathen mysteries which was before lacking. The author also quotes two hymns used apparently in the Ophite worship which are not only the sole relics of a once extensive literature, but are a great deal better evidence as to Gnostic tenets than his own loose and equivocal statements.