28. These and such like things, then, the Pythagoreans say, imitating whom the heretics think they declare great things to certain men. The Pythagorean doctrine says that the Great Geometrician and Reckoner[100] the Sun is the Demiurge of all things that are, and is fixed in the whole cosmos like the soul in bodies, as says Plato. For the Sun like the soul is fire, but the earth a body. But if fire were absent, nothing could be seen, nor could there be any solid perceptible to the touch; for there is no solid without earth. Whence God having put air in the midst, fashioned the body of the universe from fire and earth.[101] But the Sun reckons and measures the cosmos in some such fashion as this. The cosmos is that perceptible one of which we are now speaking. But (the Sun) divides it as an arithmetician and geometrician into twelve parts. And the names of these [Sidenote: p. 279.] parts are:--Ram, Bull, Twins, Crab, Lion, Virgin, Scales, Scorpion, Archer, He-goat, Waterbearer and Fishes. Again, he divides each of the twelve parts into thirty which are the thirty days of the month. And again he divides each of the thirty parts into sixty minutes and (each) minute into yet smaller and smaller parts. And thus ever creating without ceasing, but gathering together from these divided parts and making a cycle, and again dissolving it and separating that which has been put together, he perfects the great deathless cosmos.[102] 29. Something like this, as I have just summarily said, is the teaching framed by Pythagoras and Plato. From which and not from the Gospels, Valentinus has drawn his own heresy, as we shall show, and should therefore be reckoned a Pythagorean and a Platonist, but not as a Christian. Accordingly he and Heracleon and Ptolemy and all their school, the disciples of Pythagoras and Plato copying their teachers, have framed an arithmetical doctrine of their own. [Sidenote: p. 280.] For indeed an unbegotten, incorruptible, incomprehensible fruitful Monad is to them the beginning of all and the cause of the birth of all things that are. Yet a certain wide difference is found among them. For some of them, that they may keep wholly pure the Pythagorean teaching of Valentinus, consider the Father to be unfeminine,[103] spouseless, and alone: whereas the others, thinking it absolutely impossible that there could be a birth of all things that have been born from any single male, are compelled to reckon Sige[104] as a spouse to the Father of the universals in order that he may become a father. But as to whether Sige is a spouse or not, let them fight it out with each other.[105] We, keeping steadfast at present to the Pythagorean (doctrine of) the beginning and remembering what others teach, say that He is one, without spouse, without female, in need of nought. In a word (Valentinus) says at the beginning nothing was begotten, but the Father was alone, unbegotten, having neither place, nor time, nor