Apart from such comparatively small matters, however, the difference in style between the several Gnostic writers here quoted is well marked. Nothing can be more singular at first sight than the way in which the Naassene author expresses himself. It seems to the reader on the first perusal of his lucubrations as if the writer had made up his mind to follow no train of thought beyond the limits of a single sentence. Beginning with the idea of the First Man, which we find running like a thread through so many Eastern creeds, from that of the Cabalists among the Jews to the Manichæans who perhaps took it directly from its primitive source in Babylon,[86] he immediately turns from this to declare the tripartite division of the universe and everything it contains, including the souls and natures of men, and to inculcate the strictest asceticism. Yet all this is written round, so to speak, a hymn to Attis which he declares relates to the Mysteries of the Mother with several allusions to the most secret rites of the Eleusinian Demeter and, as it would appear, of those of the Greek Isis. The Peratic author, on the other hand, also teaches a tripartite division of things and souls, but draws his proofs not from the same mystic sources as the Naassene but from what Hippolytus declares to be the system of the astrologers. This system, which is not even hinted at in any avowedly astrological work, is that the stars are the cause of all that happens here below, and that we can only escape from their sway into one of the two worlds lying above ours by the help of Christ, here called the Perfect Serpent, existing as an intermediary between the Father of All and Matter. Yet this doctrine, which we can also read without much forcing of the text into the rhapsody of the Naassene, is stated with all the precision and sobriety of a scientific proposition, and is as entirely free from the fervour and breathlessness of the last-named writer as it is from his perpetual allusions to the Greek and especially to the Alexandrian and Anatolian mythology.[87] Both these again are perfectly different in style from the “Sethian” author from whom Hippolytus gives us long extracts, and who seems to have trusted mainly to an imagery which is entirely opposed to all Western conventions of modesty.[88] Yet all three aver the strongest belief in the Divinity and Divine Mission of Jesus, whom they identify with the Good Serpent, which was according to many modern authors the chief material object of adoration in every heathen temple in Asia Minor.[89] They are, therefore, rightly numbered by Hippolytus among the Ophite heresies, and seem to be founded upon traditions current throughout Western Asia which even now are not perhaps quite extinct. Yet each of the three authors quoted in our text writes in a perfectly different style from his two fellow heresiarchs, and this alone is sufficient to remove all doubt as to the genuineness of the document.