The Demiurge Works Away at Creation, as the Drudge of His Mother Achamoth, in Ignorance All the While of the Nature of His Occupation.

Chapter XX—The Demiurge Works Away at Creation, as the Drudge of His Mother Achamoth, in Ignorance All the While of the Nature of His Occupation.

The Demiurge therefore, placed as he was without the limits of the Pleroma in the ignominious solitude of his eternal exile, founded a new empire—this world (of ours)—by clearp. 514 ing away the confusion and distinguishing the difference between the two substances which severally constituted it, ⁶⁸¹⁶ the animal and the material. Out of incorporeal (elements) he constructs bodies, heavy, light, erect ⁶⁸¹⁷ and stooping, celestial and terrene. He then completes the sevenfold stages of heaven itself, with his own throne above all. Whence he had the additional name of Sabbatum from the hebdomadal nature of his abode; his mother Achamoth, too, had the title Ogdoada, after the precedent of the primeval Ogdoad. ⁶⁸¹⁸ These heavens, however, they consider to be intelligent, ⁶⁸¹⁹ and sometimes they make angels of them, as indeed they do of the Demiurge himself; as also (they call) Paradise the fourth archangel, because they fix it above the third heaven, of the power of which Adam partook, when he sojourned there amidst its fleecy clouds ⁶⁸²⁰ and shrubs. ⁶⁸²¹ Ptolemy remembered perfectly well the prattle of his boyhood, ⁶⁸²² that apples grew in the sea, and fishes on the tree; after the same fashion, he assumed that nut-trees flourished in the skies.  The Demiurge does his work in ignorance, and therefore perhaps he is unaware that trees ought to be planted only on the ground. His mother, of course, knew all about it: how is it, then, that she did not suggest the fact, since she was actually executing her own operation? But whilst building up so vast an edifice for her son by means of those works, which proclaim him at once to be father, god and, king before the conceits of the Valentinians, why she refused to let them be known to even him, ⁶⁸²³ is a question which I shall ask afterwards.

Footnotes

514:6816

Duplicis substantiæ illius disclusæ.

514:6817

Sublimantia.

514:6818

Ogdoadis primogenitalis: what Irenæus calls “the first-begotten and primary Ogdoad of the Pleroma” (See our Irenæus, Vol. I.; also above, chap. vii. p. 506.)

514:6819

Noëros.

514:6820

Nubeculas.

514:6821

Arbusculas.

514:6822

Puerilium dicibulorum.

514:6823

Sibi here must refer to the secondary agent of the sentence.