[Footnote 175: Of Ptolemy we know a little more than we do of Secundus, a letter by him to his “fair sister Flora” being given by Epiphanius (_Haer._ XXXIII.) which shows a system not inconsistent with that described in the text. Unlike Valentinus himself he gives the Father a spouse, or rather two.] [Footnote 176: διαθέσεις, perhaps “states.” Cr. and Macmahon translate “dispositions.”] [Footnote 177: Hippolytus here suddenly changes from Thelesis to Thelema. But there is no discoverable difference in the meaning of the two words.] [Footnote 178: Words in [ ] from Irenæus.] [Footnote 179: This Marcus is practically only known to us from the statements of Irenæus, from which the accounts in the text and in the later work of Epiphanius are copied. Salmon’s argument (_D.C.B._, s. v. “Marcus”) that Marcus taught in Asia Minor or Syria, and that Irenæus himself only knew his doctrines from his writings and the confessions of his Gaulish followers on their conversion to Catholicism seems irrefutable. There is no reason to doubt Irenæus’ statement here repeated that Marcus was a magician, nor the generally accepted statement of modern writers on Gnosticism that he was a Jew. This last deduction is supported by his use of Hebrew formulas, of which Irenæus gives many examples, including one beginning “βασημαχαμοσση” which appears to be “In the name of Achamoth,” the Hebrew or Aramaic equivalent of the Greek Sophia. A more cogent argument is that his identification of the Gnostic Aeons with the letters of the Greek alphabet and their numerical values is, _mutatis mutandis_, exactly correspondent to that of the so-called “practical Cabala” of the Jews which was re-introduced into Europe in the tenth to twelfth centuries, but which probably goes back to pre-Christian times and is ultimately derived from the decayed relics of the Chaldæan and Egyptian religions. On the other hand, Irenæus’ classing of Marcus among the “successors” or followers of Valentinus is much more open to question. The reverence he shows for the books of the Old Testament and for the Pentateuchal account of the Creation, which is indeed the foundation of the greater part of the system of the Cabala, is inconsistent with the views of Valentinus, who as we have seen (n. on p. 33 _supra_) must logically have rejected the inspiration of the Old Testament altogether. St. Jerome (Ep. 75, _ad Theod._, I, 449), says indeed that Marcus was a Basilidian, and although we have too little of Basilides’ own writings to check this statement, it is not impossible that the nomenclature of the Aeons, which is the chief point in which Valentinus and Marcus coincide, was common to all three heretics, and perhaps drawn from a source earlier than them all. The language of the formulas given by Irenæus but not reproduced by Hippolytus, in several instances bear a strong likeness to that of the _Great Announcement_ attributed in the earlier part of this Book to Simon Magus.]