Basilideans
The sect had three grades – material, intellectual and spiritual – and possessed two allegorical statues, male and female.
It was however almost exclusively limited to Egypt, though according to Sulpicius Severus it seems to have found an entrance into Spain through a certain Mark from Memphis.
[2] The descriptions of the Basilidian system given by our chief informants, Irenaeus (Adversus Haereses) and Hippolytus (Philosophumena), are so strongly divergent that they seem to many quite irreconcilable.
Historians such as Philip Shaff have the opinion that "Irenaeus described a form of Basilidianism which was not the original, but a later corruption of the system.
The second part of the seed-mass to burst forth could not mount up of itself, but it took to itself as a wing of the Holy Spirit, each bearing up the other with mutual benefit.
[14] When this has come to pass, God will bring upon the whole world the Great Ignorance, that everything may like being the way it is, and that nothing may desire anything contrary to its nature.
[17][18] According to Clement of Alexandria, the Basilidians taught faith was a natural gift of understanding bestowed upon the soul before its union with the body and which some possessed and others did not.
Sin was not the results of the abuse of free will, but merely the outcome of an inborn evil principle.
[20] In briefly sketching this version of Basilidianism, which most likely rests on later or corrupt accounts, our authorities are fundamentally two, Irenaeus and the lost early treatise of Hippolytus; both having much in common, and both being interwoven together in the report of Epiphanius.
Then the Unbegotten and Innominable Father, seeing what discord prevailed among men and among angels, and how the Jews were perishing, sent His Firstborn Nûs, Who is Christ, to deliver those Who believed on Him from the power of the makers of the world.
The two fullest accounts, those of Irenaeus and Epiphanius, add by way of appendix another particular of the antecedent mythology; a short notice on the same subject being likewise inserted parenthetically by Hippolytus.
[23] The supreme power and source of being above all principalities and powers and angels (such is evidently the reference of Epiphanius's αὐτῶν: Irenaeus substitutes "heavens," which in this connexion comes to much the same thing) is Abrasax, the Greek letters of whose name added together as numerals make up 365, the number of the heavens; whence, they apparently said, the year has 365 days, and the human body 365 members.
This supreme Power they called "the Cause" and "the First Archetype," while they treated as a last or weakest product this present world as the work of the last Archon.
[24] It is evident from these particulars that Abrasax was the name of the first of the 365 Archons, and accordingly stood below Sophia and Dynamis and their progenitors; but his position is not expressly stated, so that the writer of the supplement to Tertullian had some excuse for confusing him with "the Supreme God."
In accordance with this, Christ also, in the opinion of these followers of Basilides, was in the possession of a mystic name (Caulacau) by the power of which he had descended through all the heavens to Earth, and had then again ascended to the Father.
of Irenaeus has added the further statement that they used "images"; and this single word is often cited in corroboration of the popular belief that the numerous ancient gems on which grotesque mythological combinations are accompanied by the mystic name ΑΒΡΑΣΑΞ were of Basilidian origin.
No attempts of critics to trace correspondences between the mythological personages, and to explain them by supposed condensations or mutilations, have attained even plausibility.
According to Irenaeus, the Basilidians believed the God of the Jews was inferior to the 365 sets of Archons above him, as well as the powers, principalities, Dynamis and Sophia, Phronesis, Logos, Nûs, and finally the Unbegotten Father.
Their discouragement of martyrdom was one of the secrets which the Basilidians diligently cultivated, following naturally on the supposed possession of a hidden knowledge.
However, imperfect and distorted as the picture may be, such was doubtless in substance the creed of Basilidians not half a century after Basilides had written.
In this and other respects our accounts may possibly contain exaggerations; but Clement's complaint of the flagrant degeneracy in his time from the high standard set up by Basilides himself is unsuspicious evidence, and a libertine code of ethics would find an easy justification in such maxims as are imputed to the Basilidians.
Basilidianism seems to have stood alone in appropriating Abrasax; but Caulacau plays a part in more than one system, and the functions of the angels recur in various forms of Gnosticism, and especially in that derived from Saturnilus.
Epiphanius (about 375) mentions the Prosopite, Athribite, Saite, and "Alexandriopolite" (read Andropolite) nomes or cantons, and also Alexandria itself, as the places in which it still throve in his time, and which he accordingly inferred to have been visited by Basilides.
Nearer the end of the 4th century, Jerome often refers to Basilides in connexion with the hybrid Priscillianism of Spain, and the mystic names in which its votaries delighted.
According to Sulpicius Severus[28] this heresy took its rise in "the East and Egypt"; but, he adds, it is not easy to say "what the beginnings were out of which it there grew" (quibus ibi initiis coaluerit).
This fact explains how the name of Basilides and some dregs of his disciples' doctrines or practices found their way to so distant a land as Spain, and at the same time illustrates the probable hybrid origin of the secondary Basilidianism itself.
