The serpent in it is, perhaps, neither bad nor good.] [Footnote 250: τούτοις δοκεῖ, “it seems to them.”] [Footnote 251: Cruice and Macmahon both translate this “into the same nature with the spirit.”] [Footnote 252: This anxiety of the higher powers to redeem from matter darkness or chaos, the scintilla of their own being which has slipped into it, is the theme of all Gnosticism from the Ophites to the _Pistis Sophia_ and the Manichæan writings. See _Forerunners_, II, _passim_.] [Footnote 253: Or “the substances brought up to the sealer.”] [Footnote 254: ἰδέαι. And so throughout.] [Footnote 255: Schneidewin, Cruice, and Macmahon would here and elsewhere read ὁ φαλλὸς. But see the next sentence about pregnancy.] [Footnote 256: ἐξετύπωσεν, “struck off.”] [Footnote 257: πρωτόγονος. The others were “unbegotten” like the highest world of the Peratæ and Naassenes.] [Footnote 258: εἴδεσιν.] [Footnote 259: Is this Ps. xxix. 3, 10 already quoted by the Naassene author? Cf. p. 133 _supra_.] [Footnote 260: This idea of a divine son superior to his father is common to the whole Orphic cosmogony and leads to the dethroning of Uranus by Kronos, Kronos by Zeus and finally of Zeus by Dionysos. It is met with again in Basilides (see Book VII _infra_).] [Footnote 261: A lacuna here which Cruice thus fills.] [Footnote 262: This has not been previously described. Is the narrative of the Fall alluded to?] [Footnote 263: Cruice and Macmahon would translate “any other than man’s.”] [Footnote 264: Phil. ii. 7. The only quotation from the N.T. other than that from Matt. used by the Sethians, if it be not, as I believe it is, the interpolation of Hippolytus.] [Footnote 265: ἀπελούσατο. Yet it may refer to baptism which preceded initiation in nearly all the secret rites of the Pagan gods. Cf. _Forerunners_, 1, c. 2.] [Footnote 266: The whole of this paragraph reads like an interpolation, or rather as something which had got out of its place. The statement about the physicists is directly at variance with the opening of the next which attributes the Sethian teaching to the Orphics. The triads he quotes are all of three “good” powers and therefore would belong much more appropriately to the system of the Peratæ. The quotation from Deut. iv. 11, he attributes to several other heresiarchs.] [Footnote 267: The codex has ὀμφαλός for ὁ φαλλὸς which is Schneidewin’s emendation. No book attributed to Orpheus called “Bacchica” has come down to us, but the Rape of Persephone was a favourite theme with Orphic poets. Cf. Abel’s _Orphica_, pp. 209-219.] [Footnote 268: This is not improbable; but Hippolytus gives us no evidence that this is the case, as Plutarch, from whom he quotes, certainly did not connect the frescoes of Phlium in the Peloponnesus (not Attica as he says) with the Sethians, nor does the light in their story _desire_ the water.] [Footnote 269: This too is a stock quotation which has already done duty for the Naassene author. Cf. p. 131 _supra_.]