[260] This idea of a divine son superior to his father is common to the whole Orphic cosmogony and leads to the dethroning of Uranus by Kronos, Kronos by Zeus and finally of Zeus by Dionysos. It is met with again in Basilides (see Book VII infra).
[261] A lacuna here which Cruice thus fills.
[262] This has not been previously described. Is the narrative of the Fall alluded to?
[263] Cruice and Macmahon would translate “any other than man’s.”
[264] Phil. ii. 7. The only quotation from the N.T. other than that from Matt. used by the Sethians, if it be not, as I believe it is, the interpolation of Hippolytus.
[265] ἀπελούσατο. Yet it may refer to baptism which preceded initiation in nearly all the secret rites of the Pagan gods. Cf. Forerunners, 1, c. 2.
[266] The whole of this paragraph reads like an interpolation, or rather as something which had got out of its place. The statement about the physicists is directly at variance with the opening of the next which attributes the Sethian teaching to the Orphics. The triads he quotes are all of three “good” powers and therefore would belong much more appropriately to the system of the Peratæ. The quotation from Deut. iv. 11, he attributes to several other heresiarchs.
[267] The codex has ὀμφαλός for ὁ φαλλὸς which is Schneidewin’s emendation. No book attributed to Orpheus called “Bacchica” has come down to us, but the Rape of Persephone was a favourite theme with Orphic poets. Cf. Abel’s Orphica, pp. 209-219.
[268] This is not improbable; but Hippolytus gives us no evidence that this is the case, as Plutarch, from whom he quotes, certainly did not connect the frescoes of Phlium in the Peloponnesus (not Attica as he says) with the Sethians, nor does the light in their story desire the water.
[269] This too is a stock quotation which has already done duty for the Naassene author. Cf. p. [131] supra.