Simon Magus
But there was a certain man, called Simon, which beforetime in the same city used sorcery, and bewitched the people of Samaria, giving out that himself was some great one: to whom they all gave heed, from the least to the greatest, saying, "This man is the great power [Gr. Dynamis Megale] of God."[17] And to him they had regard, because that of long time he had bewitched them with sorceries. But when they believed Philip preaching the things concerning the kingdom of God, and the name of Jesus Christ, they were baptized, both men and women. Then Simon himself believed also: and when he was baptized, he continued with Philip, and wondered, beholding the miracles and signs which were done. Now when the apostles which were at Jerusalem heard that Samaria had received the word of God, they sent unto them Peter and John: who, when they were come down, prayed for them, that they might receive the Holy Ghost: (for as yet he was fallen upon none of them: only they were baptized in the name of the Lord Jesus.) Then laid they their hands on them, and they received the Holy Ghost. And when Simon saw that through laying on of the apostles' hands the Holy Ghost was given, he offered them money, saying, "Give me also this power, that on whomsoever I lay hands, he may receive the Holy Ghost." But Peter said unto him, "Thy money perish with thee, because thou hast thought that the gift of God may be purchased with money. Thou hast neither part nor lot in this matter: for thy heart is not right in the sight of God. Repent therefore of this thy wickedness, and pray God, if perhaps the thought [Gr. Epinoia][18] of thine heart may be forgiven thee, for I perceive that thou art in the gall of bitterness, and in the bond of iniquity." Then answered Simon, and said, "Pray ye to the Lord for me, that none of these things which ye have spoken come upon me."
— (Acts 8:9–24)
Reading the above it can be seen that while Simon Magus, a Samaritan, wished to be an Apostle he coveted the power rather than the desire to convert. He even went so far as to try to pay for the power, which really ticked Peter off, and he kicked him out of the city and denounced him. On arriving in Rome (before Peter) he seems to have set himself up as Jesus, telling everyone that he was the saviour, and performing “miracles” - he is said to have been a magician and a sorcerer (what’s the difference? Dunno) and to have been able to levitate himself off the ground. Unlike (or, perhaps archly, like) the man he was impersonating, he fell in with a bad woman by the name of Helen, and the Romans clapped at his magic and even made him a god.
It’s quite amazing the myths that grew up around this guy. I mean, some writers seem to have believed he actually
was God. I mean, literally. The Big Cheese, old Scarypants himself, as Rik Mayall once said, though he was referring to the Devil at the time. Epiphanius (from whom, I wonder, is it possible we get the word epiphany?), Bishop of Salamis in Cyprus, wrote that - oh wait just one tension-popping moment! I’ve heard of this guy. Wasn’t he the one who refuted Origen in my journal about the Devil, moaning that he was wrong about his interpretation of God or something? And it seems that he didn’t believe what I’m about to relate, but did in fact refute it in his
Panarion (it means bread-basket - why did he title it so?) which is a work basically demolishing all Christian sects whose specific beliefs he did not agree with. Spent a lot of his time refuting, did our Epiphanius; seems to have been pretty much all he did. Nobody could refute like him. A dab hand at the old refuting, this lad.
So then, Epiphanius tells and then refutes (see?) the story that God was sitting around bored one day, long long ago, so long ago that even I don’t remember what I was doing. Long before he had the spiffing idea of creating a universe, even. And a thought popped into his head, known as his First Thought, and for some unfathomable reason given a name and even a sex, female. The thought was called
Ennoia (which, I have to be honest, sounds very close to annoy doesn’t it?) and gave him this idea, literally translated from the pages of
Panarion:
“Fuck me but I’m bored sitting around here with nothing to do. I am great after all. Why isn’t somebody here praising me? I need to be praised, and constantly too. No point in hiring some dumbos who will drop in twice a week for a quick “Hosanna” and then feck off home, leaving me lonely and bored and un-praised. Nah, I need full-time staff. See to it will you Ennoia?”
(Okay I lied. Back to Ennoia and her great thought):
And so she did. She made herself into an idea, this thought called
Annoy ya and this thought was this: where in the name of blue jumping fu
ck am I going to find professional sycophants for this guy? Congress hasn’t been invented, Trump is trillennia from being born, and this copy of
God News is three months old! I know! I’ll make them, I will. What a good idea.”
And so she did. Down to - well, I really don’t know. Down to nowhere really. If this was, as the account suggests, the Beginning, then really nothing should have existed, should it? There should have been nowhere to go. What does it say in that bestseller of fiction? “In the Beginning was the Word, and the Word was God, and something something was without form something.” I don’t know: I haven’t opened a Bible since I was a kid, and even then I was bored. But religion - especially Christianity - is full of these paradoxes, and they’re never explained, mostly because they can’t be. The old f-word is used so often - no, not that one! Faith I mean - it becomes a catch-all for everything that’s too hard, or even impossible to explain, sort of “a wizard did it” kind of thing.
Anyhoo, this thought went somewhere, and created the angels. Masterstroke. Smashed it. God will be really happy now, thought Ennoia, and headed back up to tell him the Good News. Well, tried to anyway. Seems the angels, for some reason, according to this account, were none too pleased to have been created. Kind of like your annoying teenage son fuming “I didn’t ask to be born!” Well, they didn’t, and they were, on the whole, pretty pissed off about it. They grabbed Enoia - of whom, it is said, they were jealous - and jammed her into a female body.
Now, again, help me out here. Man had not been created, much less woman. The angels were the first living beings to be made by God, or his thought at any rate, so without the actual concept of male and female, how did they manage to…? Look, let’s just leave all this inconvenient logic behind us, yeah? Go crazy otherwise. So they put poor old Ennoia into a female body and proceeded to, um, humiliate her down through the ages, as Man came swaggering onto the scene, much later. The angels, according to this account (which might have been part of the reason poor old Epiphanius spat out his unleavened bread or whatever he was eating and said “Oh no you fu
cking don’t lads!”) created the world as a prison for Ennoia, gave her the finger, said, “That’ll teach you to create us, you bitch!” and slouched off to Heaven, where God greeted them, not with joy or love, but with a sharp glance at his watch and a frown, asking “where the hell have you guys been? Get to work immediately and don’t expect any fu
cking lunch break!”
Maybe the angels had a point in not having wanted to be born. I mean, when your entire existence consists of telling one ageing white guy how great he is, you might as well be in Donald Trump’s staff! Anyway at some point God must have thought “Where the hooting heck is that thought of mine?” and the angels shrugging uncomfortably and changing the subject by commenting loudly on how shiny his hair was, and how he only look a quadrillion gazillion years old and they could not believe he was so much older than that, surely not, he decided the only thing he could do was get up off his divine ass and lever himself up off of the couch (with the assistance of an infinite number of angels, all of whom did groan and grunt and sweat most profusely but yea, did refrain from suggestion the old guy sign up for a gym membership or maybe take more walks) and go looking for her.
In perhaps the first ever instance of finding yourself, this account goes on to say he discovered her on Earth, and was mightily pissed. He descended to Earth, possibly making admiring remarks about the architecture, and found his thought Ennoia was in the body of a woman called Helen. He came to her in the shape of (thought I’d forgotten, didn’t you? Thought my mind was wandering again) Simon Magus, speaking thus:
"And on her account," he says, "did I come down; for this is that which is written in the Gospel 'the lost sheep'. - Epiphanius, Panarion, 21.3.5
His explanation then seems to have been a little, shall we say, distracted as he went on.
“For as the angels were mismanaging the world, owing to their individual lust for rule, he had come to set things straight, and had descended under a changed form, likening himself to the Principalities and Powers through whom he passed, so that among men he appeared as a man, though he was not a man, and was thought to have suffered in Judaea, though he had not suffered.”
Right. Glad we got that sorted then. But he wasn’t finished, oh no.
"But in each heaven I changed my form," says he, "in accordance with the form of those who were in each heaven, that I might escape the notice of my angelic powers and come down to the Thought, who is none other than her who is also called Prunikos and Holy Ghost, through whom I created the angels, while the angels created the world and men."
Oh-kay. Well, it’s no wonder Eipihanius blew a fuse, is it? While it’s a given that trying to figure logic into religion is a waste of time, there are some basic details here that seriously challenge standard Christian dogma.
First: the idea of God’s thoughts, or any part of him, being female. Surely this is not what the Church, an institution which delights in keeping women down and which, through its teachings via the Bible, holds all of womanhood liable for humanity’s unceremonious ejection from the Garden of Eden, wants to preach? God is a man. There is no argument. God is superior. Man is superior. Therefore, God must be a man. QED. How dare anyone suggest any part of him be female? And his thoughts? As we all know, the brain is the seat of the human personality, so what is being suggested here is that the most important part of God - his brain - is (at least in part) female, which is tantamount to saying
God is female!
Heresy!
Second: the account claims that this female thought created the angels, not God. Well, I mean, yes, essentially it’s still God, but I can imagine Epiphanius fuming at the idea of “any part of God being female” and that part being given the glory of bringing the angels into being. I doubt he would have been amused.
Heresy!
Third: The angels create Earth and imprison Ennoia (God, basically) there. What happened to “God moved on the waters” or whatever? Everyone knows the big man made the Earth, no damn angels. Angels are good at singing and praising and occasionally fighting for the Lord, doing the odd Annunciation to unsuspecting virgins, but creating the Earth? Do me a favour, son. Next you’ll be asking me to believe there’s more than one God!
Heresy!
Fourth, and finally: God comes down to Earth, not as Jesus, not to take on the sins of men (well, women really, but we’ll give them a pass - for now) and to bring eternal salvation, but to save his whore?
Heres - well, you get the picture.
So Epiphanius roundly condemned and branded Simon Magus as a heretic, as had Hippolytus, another well respected theologian, a century before when he wrote, rather more damningly,
“But the liar was enamoured of this wench, whose name was Helen, and had bought her and had her to wife, and it was out of respect for his disciples that he invented this fairy-tale.”
You’ve got to wonder, don’t you, if this “wench Helen” (sometimes called Helena) is linked to or based on or in any way related to she of the Trojan War, that “face that launched a thousand ships” and who is of course blamed by Homer for the war, continuing a longstanding tradition of putting it all on the woman. Women aren’t allowed on ships because they’re bad luck. Women for a long time couldn’t vote, or own property. Women married to kings were blamed if they couldn’t get pregnant, or, if they did, if they lost the child. Women were burned as witches (seldom ever men) and women were stalked by killers like Jack the Ripper. All the way back to poor unfortunate Eve, who after all was just a bit peckish and took the Yelp review of the big tree from that nice snakelike fellow, women have been oppressed, put upon, blamed and punished for almost every evil that has befallen man.
At any rate, Hippolytus goes on to describe how Peter (yes I know, we’re getting there, we’re getting there) took on the heretic:
Until he came to Rome also and fell foul of the Apostles. Peter withstood him on many occasions. At last he came ... and began to teach sitting under a plane tree. When he was on the point of being shown up, he said, in order to gain time, that if he were buried alive he would rise again on the third day. So he bade that a tomb should be dug by his disciples and that he should be buried in it. Now they did what they were ordered, but he remained there until now: for he was not the Christ.
Oops! I suppose there’s such a thing as believing your own press too much, huh? I can just see the poor old disciples of Simon, standing around, looking at their watches (yes, yes!) and turning to each other after four days, shrugging and slowly dispersing. Backed the wrong horse again.