188 



" On Gnostic Amulets. 



Basileides (all the books call it Abraxas, but I have never met with 

 it written thus on the actual gems). The letters, when treated as 

 Greek numerals, make up the number three hundred and sixty-five, 

 and so connect the figure with the sun. It also means holy name. 

 Among other names borrowed from the Hebrew may be found 

 I. A. 0.= Jehovah, Sabaoth, Michael, &c, and the mysterious word 

 A/3\ava0ava\/3a, a mere corruption of the Syriac " Thou art our 

 lather/'' but possessing as a charm the inestimable quality of reading 

 the same backwards or forwards. 



Of the figure which I show on the back of which this last word 

 is cut, I could not for a long time guess any possible meaning, 

 but I happened not long ago to find, in one of Lucian's dialogues, 

 the account of an impostor of Asia Minor, who, once a Christian, 

 professed to be inspired by the divine serpent, and held up for the 

 admiring crowd to worship an egg, supposed to contain the embryo 

 of the said serpent incarnated. I cannot help suspecting that we 

 have here a record of Lucian's Alexander of Abonoteichus (wherever 

 that was), whom the satirist so justly abuses and laughs at. 



The divine serpent introduces us to another class of gnostics, the 

 Ophites, or so-called serpent worshippers, whose gems are very 

 numerous. They seemed to have believed that the Creator of the 

 world, far from being all-mighty and all-loving, was an inferior, if 

 not an actually malevolent agent, and that the higher spirit, in the 

 form of the serpent, by inducing our first parents to eat the for- 

 bidden fruit, imparted to them that spark of divine knowledge 

 which shall finally raise them above their maker's power. It is the 

 consciousness of this by their original maker, which produces all 

 man's suffering in this world ; for his maker, the Demiurgus, is 

 constantly endeavouring to seduce or compel those his creatures 

 whom he knows to be in reality his superiors — to be unfaithful to 

 their higher teaching, and submit to be incorporated into this 

 material world, of which he is the master. 



(This hatred of all matter, as unclean, which was universal among 

 gnostics, is, I fancy, essentially Oriental.) 



But this good serpent was somehow identified with the sun. I 

 suppose that here we have the gnostic connection with the Egyptian 



