The reason given for this imprisonment of Sophia in most of the systems is that she endeavoured to create without her Syzygy, the Father or Nous, wishing to imitate alone the self-generating power of the Supreme.  Thus through ignorance she involved herself in suffering, from which she was freed by repentance and experience.  What explanation of this supreme mystery was publicly ventured on by Simon we cannot know, for the patristic accounts are confused and contradictory.

Irenaeus tells us that: 

     She was the first Conception (Epinoia) of his Mind, the Mother of
     All, by whom in the beginning he conceived in his Mind, the making
     of the Angels and Archangels.

This Epinoia, leaping forth from him (the Boundless Power), 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 the world was made.  And after she had generated them, she was detained by them through envy, for they did not wish to be thought the progeny of another.  As for himself he was entirely unknown by them; and it was his Thought (Epinoia) that was made prisoner by the Powers and Angels that had been emanated by her.  And she suffered every kind of indignity at their hands to prevent her reaescending to her Father, even to being imprisoned in the human body and transmigrating into other female bodies, as from one vessel into another.

Tertullian’s account differs by the important addition that the “design of the Father was prevented”; how or why he does not say.

She was his first Suggestion whereby he suggested the making of the Angels and Archangels; that she sharing in this design had sprung forth from the Father, and leaped down into the Lower Regions; and that there, the design of the Father being prevented, she had brought forth Angelic Powers ignorant of the Father, the artificer of this world (?); by these she was detained, not according to his intention, lest when she had gone they should be thought to be the progeny of another, etc.

The Philosophumena say nothing on this point, except that Epinoia “throws all the Powers in the World into confusion through her unsurpassable Beauty.”

Philaster renders confusion worse confounded, by writing: 

And he also dared to say that the World had been made by Angels, and the Angels again had been made by certain endowed with perception from Heaven, and that they (the Angels) had deceived the human race.

     He asserted, moreover, that there was a certain other Thought
     (Intellectus) who descended into the world for the salvation of
     men.

Epiphanius further complicates the problem as follows: