gods, but one God of all these gods,
incomprehensible and unknown to all, ... a Power of immeasurable
and ineffable Light, whose greatness is held to be
incomprehensible, a Tower which the maker of the world does not
know.

This is a fundamental dogma of the Gnosis in all climes and in all ages.
The demiurgic deity is not the All-Deity, for there is an infinite
succession of universes, each having its particular deity, its Brahma,
to use the Hindu term, but this Brahma is not THAT which is
Para-Brahman, that which is beyond Brahma.

This view of the Simonian Gnosis has been magnificently anticipated in
the _Rig Veda_ (x. 129) which reads in the fine translation of
Colebrooke as follows:

That, whence all this great creation came,
Whether Its will created or was mute,
The Most High Seer that is in highest Heaven,
He knows it--or perchance even He knows not.

In treating of emanation, evolution, creation or whatever other term may
be given to the process of manifestation, therefore, the teachers deal
only with one particular universe; the Unmanifested Root, and Universal
Cause of all Universes lying behind, in potentiality ([Greek: dynamis]),
in Incomprehensible Silence ([Greek: sigae akatalaeptos]). For on the
"Tongue of the Ineffable" are many "Words" ([Greek: logoi]), each
Universe having its own Logos.

Thus then Simon speaks of the Logos of this Universe and calls it Fire
([Greek: pyr]). This is the Universal Principle or Beginning ([Greek:
ton holon archae]), or Universal Rootage ([Greek: rizoma ton holon]).
But this Fire is not the fire of earth; it is Divine Light and Life and
Mind, the Perfect Intellectual ([Greek: to teleion noeron]). It is the
One Power, "generating itself, increasing itself, seeking itself,
finding itself, its own mother, its own father, its sister, its spouse:
the daughter, son, mother, and father of itself; One, the Universal
Root." It is That, "which has neither beginning nor end, existing in
oneness." "Producing itself by itself, it manifested to itself its own
Thought ([Greek: epinoia])."

It is quite true that this symbology of Fire is not original with
Simon, but there is also no reason to suppose that the Samaritan
teacher plagiarized from Heracleitus when we know that the major part of
antiquity regarded fire and the sun as the most fitting symbols of
Deity. Of the manifested elements, fire was the most potent, and
therefore the most fitti