1.  Simon was a Samaritan, the notorious magician of whom Luke the disciple and adherent of the apostles says:  “But there was a fellow by name Simon, who had previously practised the art of magic in their state, and led away the people of the Samaritans, saying that he was some great one, to whom they all listened, from the small to the great, saying:  ‘He is the Power of God, which is called Great.’  Now they gave heed to him because he had driven them out of their wits by his magical phenomena.”  This Simon, therefore, pretended to be a believer, thinking that the apostles also wrought their cures by magic and not by the power of God; and supposing that their filling with the Holy Spirit by the laying on of hands those who believed in God, through that Christ Jesus who was being preached by them—­that this was effected by some superior magical knowledge, and offering money to the apostles, so that he also might obtain the power of giving the Holy Spirit to whomsoever he would, he received this answer from Peter:  “Thy money 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