Simon Magus

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Simon Magus is a first-century Samaritan named in the New Testament as a practitioner of magic, and remembered in later Christian tradition as the first heretic — the figure to whom the church fathers traced the whole tangle of Gnostic error. Almost nothing about him survives except through the writings of men set against him, and the distance between whatever he was and what he was made to stand for is the central problem of any account.

His single scriptural appearance is brief. The Acts of the Apostles places him in Samaria, where he amazes the people with sorcery and is said to be called “the power of God that is called Great”; he accepts baptism, then offers the apostles money for the gift of conferring the Holy Spirit and is sharply rebuked. From this episode comes the word simony — the buying or selling of sacred office — which outlived the man by many centuries. The narrative says nothing of a system of doctrine and leaves him chastened rather than condemned.

The heresiologists made him into something far larger. Beginning with Justin Martyr in the second century and elaborated by Irenaeus, Hippolytus, and Epiphanius, Simon was presented as the source from which every later heresy flowed. They reported that he traveled with a woman named Helena, whom they said he had found as a prostitute in Tyre and identified as the divine Thought, the First Conception fallen into matter and bound in successive human bodies; that he claimed to be the supreme power appearing in different forms; and that his followers, the Simonians, honored the pair as god and goddess. How much of this reflects what Simon actually taught, and how much is a polemical construction assembled to give Gnosticism a disreputable origin, is precisely what scholarship cannot settle. The sources are hostile, late, and dependent on one another, and some historians doubt whether a coherent Simonian doctrine ever existed at all.

A second, more legendary Simon grows out of the apocryphal Acts of Peter and the Clementine literature. There he becomes the apostle Peter’s recurring antagonist, a sorcerer who performs marvels by the help of demons, animates statues, and at last attempts to fly above Rome before Peter’s prayer brings him crashing to earth. This contest between true and false wonder-working proved durable: the pact-bound magician undone by his own ambition is one of the threads that later feed the legend of Faust, and Simon is sometimes named as its remote ancestor.

What can be said with confidence is small. A Samaritan religious teacher of that name and reputation seems to have existed; a movement bearing his name was known in the second century; and Christian writers found in him a convenient single root for a diffuse phenomenon. The rest is the work of his accusers, and of the imaginations that kept retelling him. He is less a man recovered than a name the tradition needed.

→ In the library: Mead — Simon Magus: An Essay (1892) · Mead — Fragments of a Faith Forgotten (1906)

→ Related: Acts Of The Apostles · Gnosis · Apollonius Of Tyana · Aeon · Emanation