ey perish with thee, since
thou hast thought that the gift of God is obtained possession of
with money; for thee there is neither part nor lot in this Word,
for thy heart is not right before God. For I see thou art in the
gall of bitterness and the bond of iniquity."

And since the magician still refused to believe in God, he
ambitiously strove to contend against the apostles, so that he also
might be thought of great renown, by extending his investigations
into universal magic still farther, so that he struck many aghast;
so much so that he is said to have been honoured with a statue for
his magic knowledge by Claudius Caesar.

He, therefore, was glorified by many as a god; and he taught that
it was he himself who, forsooth, appeared among the Jews as the
Son, while in Samaria he descended as the Father, and in the rest
of the nations he came as the Holy Spirit. That he was the highest
power, to wit, the Father over all, and that he allowed himself to
be called by whatever name men pleased.

2. Now the sect of the Samaritan Simon, from whom all the heresies
took their origin, was composed of the following materials.

He took round with him a certain Helen, a hired prostitute from the
Phoenician city Tyre, after he had purchased her freedom, saying
that she was the first conception (or Thought) of his Mind, the
Mother of All, by whom in the beginning he conceived in his Mind
the making of the Angels and Archangels. That this Thought, leaping
forth from him, and knowing what was the will of her Father,
descended to the lower regions and generated the Angels and Powers,
by whom also he said this world was made. And after she had
generated them, she was detained by them through envy, for they did
not wish to be thought to be the progeny of any other. As for
himself, he was entirely unknown by them; and it was his Thought
that was made prisoner by the Powers and Angels that has been
emanated by her. And she suffered every kind of indignity at their
hands, to prevent her reaescending to her Father, even to being
imprisoned in the human body and transmigrating into other female
bodies, as from one vessel into another.[7] She also was in that
Helen, on whose account the Trojan War arose; wherefore also
Stesichorus[8] was deprived of his sight when