It is in his system and in that of Menander, his pupil and successor, that we find what the term “Magic” meant for Initiates in those days.
Simon, as all the other Gnostics, taught that our world was created by the lower angels, whom he called Æons. He mentions only three [pg 466] degrees of such, because it was and is useless, as we have before explained, to teach anything about the four higher ones, and he therefore begins at the plane of globes A and G. His system is as near to Occult Truth as any, so that we may examine it, as well as his own and Menander's claims about “Magic,” to find out what they meant by the term. Now, for Simon, the summit of all manifested creation was Fire. It was, with him as with us, the Universal Principle, the Infinite Potency, born from the concealed Potentiality. This Fire was the primeval cause of the manifested world of being, and was dual, having a manifested and a concealed, or secret, side.
The secret side of the Fire is concealed in its evident [or objective] side, and the objective is produced from the secret side,[796]
he writes, which amounts to saying that the visible is ever present in the invisible, and the invisible in the visible. This was but a new form of stating Plato's idea of the Intelligible (Noêton) and the Sensible (Aisthêton), and Aristotle's teaching on the Potency (Dunamis) and the Act (Energeia). For Simon, all that can be thought of, all that can be acted upon, was perfect intelligence. Fire contained all. And thus all the parts of that Fire, being endowed with intelligence and reason, were susceptible of development by extension and emanation. This is our teaching of the Manifested Logos, and these parts in their primordial emanation are our Dhyân Chohans, the “Sons of Flame and Fire,” or higher Æons. This “Fire” is the symbol of the active and living side of Divine Nature. Behind it lay “infinite Potentiality in Potentiality,” which Simon named “that which has stood, stands and will stand,” or permanent stability and personified immutability.
From the Potency of Thought, Divine Ideation thus passed to Action. Hence the series of primordial emanations through Thought begetting the Act, the objective side of Fire being the Mother, the sacred side of it being the Father. Simon called these emanations Syzygies (a united pair, or couple), for they emanated two-by-two, one as an active, and the other as a passive Æon. Three couples thus emanated (or six in all, the Fire being the seventh), to which Simon gave the following names: “Mind and Thought; Voice and Name; Reason and Reflection,”[797] the first in each pair being male, the last female. From these primordial six emanated the six Æons of the Middle World. Let us see what Simon himself says:
Each of these six primitive beings contained the entire infinite Potency [of its parent]; but it was there only in Potency, and not in Act. That Potency had to be called forth [or conformed] through an image in order that it should manifest in all its essence, virtue, grandeur and effects; for only then could the emanated Potency become similar to its parent, the eternal and infinite Potency. If, on the contrary, it remained simply potentially in the six Potencies and failed to be conformed through an image, then the Potency would not pass into action, but would get lost,[798]
in clearer terms, it would become atrophied, as the modern expression goes.
Now, what do these words mean if not that to be equal in all things to the Infinite Potency the Æons had to imitate it in its action, and become themselves, in their turn, emanative Principles, as was their Parent, giving life to new beings, and becoming Potencies in actu themselves? To produce emanations, or to have acquired the gift of Kriyâ-shakti.[799] is the direct result of that power, an effect which depends on our own action. That power, then, is inherent in man, as it is in the primordial Æons and even in the secondary Emanations, by the very fact of their and our descent from the One Primordial Principle, the Infinite Power, or Potency. Thus we find in the system of Simon Magus that the first six Æons, synthesized by the seventh, the Parent Potency, passed into Act, and emanated, in their turn, six secondary Æons, which were each synthesized by their respective Parents. In the Philosophumena we read that Simon compared the Æons to the “Tree of Life.” Said Simon in the Revelation:[800]
It is written that there are two ramifications of the universal Æons, having neither beginning nor end, issued both from the same Root, the invisible and incomprehensible Potentiality, Sigê [Silence]. One of these [series of Æons] appears from above. This is the Great Potency, Universal Mind [or Divine Ideation, the Mahat of the Hindus]; it orders all things and is male. The other is from below, for it is the Great [manifested] Thought, the female Æon, generating all things. These [two kinds of Æons] corresponding[801] with each other, have conjunction and manifest the middle distance [the intermediate sphere, or plane], the incomprehensible Air which has neither beginning nor end.[802]
This female “Air” is our Ether, or the kabalistic Astral Light. It [pg 468] is, then, the Second World of Simon, born of Fire, the principle of everything. We call it the One Life, the Intelligent, Divine Flame, omnipresent and infinite. In Simon's system this Second World was ruled by a Being, or Potency, both male and female, or active and passive, good and bad. This Parent-Being, like the primordial infinite Potency, is also called “that which has stood, stands and will stand,” so long as the manifested Kosmos shall last. When it emanated in actu and became like unto its own Parent, it was not dual or androgyne. It is the Thought (Sigê) that emanated from it which became as itself (the Parent), having become like unto its image (or antetype); the second had now become in its turn the first (on its own plane or sphere). As Simon has it: