Simon Magus

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In a Samaritan town in the middle of the first century, a man worked wonders in the street and the crowds gave him a name. They called him the Power of God that is called Great. That is almost the whole of what the record reports about Simon the magician before the long afterlife took over: a teacher of magic in Samaria, a following that ran from the small to the great, and a title that placed him not among prophets or philosophers but among the powers themselves. What grew from that scene — the first heretic, the father of all error, the sorcerer who tried to fly above Rome — was built by men set against him, and the distance between whatever he was and what he was made to carry is the governing fact of any account.

The single scriptural scene

His one appearance in the New Testament is brief and oddly inconclusive. The Acts of the Apostles places Simon in Samaria, where he has long amazed the people with sorcery and given out that he is “some great one,” so that the whole city, from least to greatest, says of him that he is the great power of God. When Philip preaches and baptizes, Simon believes and is baptized too, and attaches himself to the apostles, marveling at the signs they perform. Then comes the act that fixed his name. Seeing that the Holy Spirit is conferred by the laying on of the apostles’ hands, he offers them money for the same power — and Peter rebukes him sharply, telling him his silver will perish with him because he has imagined that the gift of God can be bought. Simon asks for their prayers and the scene closes; he is left chastened rather than condemned, with no doctrine attributed to him and no system named.

From those few verses comes the word simony — the buying or selling of sacred office or grace — which outlived the man by a millennium and a half and became, in the medieval and Reformation church, one of the gravest charges a cleric could face. The word is his only by inheritance. It names a sin abstracted from his single recorded act, and the elaborate ecclesiastical concept is a separate matter from the figure whose offer of coin gave it a label. What the narrative itself supplies is thin: a Samaritan wonder-worker, a public title that claims divine power, a baptism, a botched transaction, a warning. Everything massive that later attaches to the name attaches to this slender frame from outside it.

The heresiological Simon

The figure the tradition remembers is overwhelmingly the work of the heresiologists — the early Christian writers who cataloged and refuted the teachers they judged false. To them Simon was not a footnote in Acts but a headwater. Justin Martyr, himself a Samaritan from Flavia Neapolis writing near the middle of the second century, gave the earliest extended notice. He placed Simon’s origin in the village of Gitta, reported that nearly all the Samaritans and a few among other nations honored him as the first god, and made the claim that has shadowed the whole dossier ever since: that Simon had been honored at Rome under Claudius with a statue on an island in the Tiber, between the two bridges, bearing the inscription Simoni Deo Sancto — to Simon the holy god. Justin also named the woman who traveled with Simon, a former prostitute he called his First Thought.

Irenaeus of Lyon, in the treatise of about 180 usually called Against Heresies, turned the notice into a genealogy. He set Simon at the root of a single corrupt lineage from which every later school of error was made to descend, and he gave the Helena myth its fullest early form. Simon, he wrote, had redeemed from a brothel in the Phoenician city of Tyre a woman named Helena, and declared her to be the first conception of his mind — his Ennoia, the Thought, the Mother of All — through whom he had conceived the making of the angels and powers. This Thought, leaping forth from him, had descended into the lower regions and generated the powers that made the world; but they detained her out of jealousy, subjected her to every indignity, and bound her in body after body, so that she who had been the first conception of God passed through a long captivity in human form and stood at last for hire. Simon had come down through those same world-ruling powers to free her — to recover the lost Thought and, in doing so, to offer salvation to those who knew him. He presented himself, the fathers report, as the supreme power appearing in successive guises: to the Samaritans as Father, to the Jews as Son, to the nations as Holy Spirit. His followers, the Simonians, honored the pair as god and goddess.

Hippolytus of Rome, in the Refutation of All Heresies of the early third century, added a different layer. Where Irenaeus arranged Simon as the ancestor of heresy, Hippolytus sought to expose Simonian doctrine as Greek philosophy in disguise, and quoted from a treatise he calls the Great Declaration (Apophasis Megalē) — a dense cosmological text attributed to Simon, built on the image of an infinite Power, a hidden Fire with a manifest and a concealed aspect, and a root of all things unfolding into pairs. Whether the Great Declaration is genuinely Simonian, a later Simonian composition, or a text Hippolytus assigned to Simon to suit his argument, is among the sharpest of the unanswerable questions. Two centuries later Epiphanius of Salamis placed Simon at the head of his vast catalog of sects, the Panarion — the medicine chest, eighty heresies arranged as so many venoms with their antidotes — making Simon the first entry in the list and the arch-heretic by position as well as by reputation.

The architecture these writers built around Simon is a recognizable Gnostic shape. A divine Thought falls from the fullness into matter, is imprisoned by the powers that govern the lower world, and is sought out and restored by a descending redeemer who brings, with her recovery, the knowledge that frees those who possess it. The fallen and recovered wisdom-figure recurs across the systems the same fathers describe — in the Sophia of the Valentinians, in the mythologies they trace through Basilides and the Sethians and others. Setting Simon at the source let the heresiologists give that whole family a single, disreputable origin: a sorcerer rebuked in scripture, traveling with a redeemed prostitute, calling himself a god. Whether the resemblance runs the way they claimed — Simon as the seed, the later schools as the harvest — or whether they read a developed Gnostic pattern backward onto a half-remembered Samaritan teacher is precisely what the sources cannot settle.

The legendary Simon

A third Simon, larger and more theatrical than either the scriptural or the doctrinal one, grows out of the apocryphal Acts of Peter and the Clementine literature — the pair of early Christian romances that follow Clement of Rome and the apostle Peter through the cities of the Syrian coast. There Simon becomes Peter’s permanent antagonist, pursued and disputed from town to town, a worker of marvels by the help of demons who makes statues move, changes his own face, and passes through fire. The contest reaches its set piece at Rome. To prove himself divine before Nero and the crowd, Simon rises into the air over the city; Peter prays against the demons carrying him, the support fails, and the magician falls — breaking his legs, and in the fullest tellings dying of the injuries, stoned by the same crowd that had marveled at him. The place of the fall left a trace in Roman memory: in the eighth century Pope Paul I founded an oratory remembered as ubi cecidit magus — the place where the magician fell.

This figure — the pact-bound sorcerer whose wonders are real but borrowed, undone by his own overreach against a true holy man — proved among the most durable the tradition produced. It runs forward through the medieval magus tales into the legend of Faust, and the contest of true against false wonder-working that structures the Acts of Peter is the template that the German Faustbuch of 1587 would inherit and recast. Simon is regularly named as the remote ancestor of that line: the first scholar-magician in the Western imagination to bargain his soul’s powers against a sacred order and lose. The flight over Rome, repainted in fresco and altarpiece for centuries, became the image by which the whole figure was known.

He has a near-contemporary counterpart in Apollonius of Tyana, the Cappadocian holy man whose wonders a later age would weigh against the gospel miracles. The two are instructive precisely because they are not the same kind of memory. Apollonius survives through one long admiring biography that made him a pagan sage; Simon survives through hostile reports that made him a warning. The first was claimed by the philosophers, the second disowned by the church — two ancient wonder-workers sorted into opposite files by the people who chose to remember them.

The historiographical problem

What can be said with confidence about the man is small, and the reason is built into the evidence. Simon is known almost entirely through the testimony of his enemies: hostile, written generations after the events, and demonstrably dependent on one another, so that an error or invention in an early notice propagates down the chain as agreement. The category they used to file him — Gnosticism as a single movement with a single founder — is itself a construction of these same writers, and current scholarship has spent decades arguing that it conceals more than it reveals. The studies of Michael Williams and Karen King in particular have pressed the case that the figures grouped under the label did not recognize themselves as one religion, and that the genealogy descending from Simon is a polemical artifact rather than a historical lineage. To make Simon the fountainhead was to give a diffuse and various phenomenon the tidiness of a family tree with a villain at its root.

The Roman statue is the cleanest illustration of how the construction worked. In 1574 a stone pedestal was unearthed on the Tiber island at just the spot Justin described, and its inscription read Semoni Sanco Deo Fidio Sacrum — a dedication not to Simon at all but to Semo Sancus, an ancient Sabine god of oaths, contracts, and good faith, worshipped in Rome long before any Samaritan reached it. Justin, it appears, encountered or heard of such a stone, read Semoni Sanco as Simoni Sancto, and reported a Roman cult of Simon that very likely never existed. Irenaeus and later writers repeated the claim; it became fixed evidence; and the whole of it rests, in all probability, on a misread dative.

Set against the polemical superstructure, the residue is genuinely thin but not empty. A Samaritan religious teacher of that name and reputation seems to have existed in the first century — the Acts notice is independent of the later schemata and shows no interest in making him a heresiarch. A movement bearing his name, the Simonians, was known in the second century and honored him with Helena as a divine pair. And early Christian writers, needing a single root for a tangle of rival teachers, found in the scriptural sorcerer a ready-made ancestor — disgraced, magical, foreign to the apostolic line — and grew the genealogy from him. Whether a coherent Simonian doctrine ever existed, or whether the Great Declaration preserves his thought, the sources leave undecided, because they were never written to record him faithfully. They were written to refute him.

Texts and scholarship

The primary witnesses are all heresiological and all hostile, and they must be read against their own purpose. Justin’s notice survives in his First Apology; Irenaeus treats Simon in the first book of Against Heresies; Hippolytus devotes a section of the Refutation of All Heresies to him and to the Great Declaration; Epiphanius opens the catalog of the Panarion with him. For most of Christian history these reports, and the apocryphal Acts of Peter and the Clementine romances, were the whole of what was available. The first modern English synthesis came from G. R. S. Mead, whose essay Simon Magus (1892) gathered the patristic notices in translation and attempted to reconstruct a Simonian philosophy from behind the polemic — a sympathetic project shaped by the Theosophical assumption of a single perennial Gnosis, and now read for its historiography rather than its conclusions. His Fragments of a Faith Forgotten (1906) sets Simon within that wider reconstruction. Mead’s translations are serviceable as a second witness even where his interpretive frame is no longer tenable; in his rendering of Justin, Simon’s Helena is the redeemed Thought of God reduced to a wandering captive — the woman the Apocryphon tradition would call, in his words, “the lost sheep.”

The standard critical scholarship has reframed the question. Stephen Haar’s Simon Magus: The First Gnostic? (De Gruyter, 2003) reexamines the Acts episode and the Graeco-Roman vocabulary of magos and magic, and treats the title’s question — whether Simon was the first Gnostic — as one whose conventional answer is largely a retrojection. Alberto Ferreiro’s Simon Magus in Patristic, Medieval and Early Modern Traditions (Brill, 2005) traces the long reception from Justin through the art and literature of the early modern period, following the magician’s transformation into a fixture of Christian polemic and a remote source for the Faust material. For the larger argument that Gnosticism, taken as a single religion, is itself a distorting category — the frame within which Simon’s role as founder makes sense — Michael Williams’s Rethinking “Gnosticism” (Princeton, 1996) and Karen King’s What Is Gnosticism? (Harvard, 2003) are the decisive interventions. The pre-1945 patristic translations remain freely available: Irenaeus and Hippolytus in the Ante-Nicene Fathers and in F. Legge’s 1921 Philosophumena, with the Greek of Hippolytus in Wendland’s critical edition of 1916. No complete pre-modern English translation of Epiphanius’s Panarion exists; the Simon material there must be read in the Greek of Karl Holl’s critical edition or in Frank Williams’s modern rendering.

The figure that emerges from this apparatus is double, and the doubleness is the point. There is the Simon of Acts — a Samaritan magician rebuked for trying to buy a power that was not for sale — and there is the Simon of the fathers and the romances, the heresiarch with his fallen goddess and his fatal flight, assembled piece by piece to give the church an enemy at the beginning of its story. The 1574 stone settles the smaller question and sharpens the larger one. The pedestal in the Tiber was always Semo Sancus’s, raised to a Sabine god of sworn faith; the Samaritan who was read into it had asked, once, to buy what the apostles would not sell. Of the two inscriptions the river kept, the one that was never there is the one the tradition needed most.

→ In the library: Mead — Simon Magus: An Essay (1892) · Mead — Fragments of a Faith Forgotten (1906) · Mead — The Gnosis According to Its Foes

→ Related: Acts Of The Apostles · Gnosis · Apollonius Of Tyana · Aeon · Emanation · Clementine Literature · Patristic Heresiology · Justin Martyr · Irenaeus · Hippolytus · Epiphanius · Marcion Of Sinope · Basilides · Heresy · Magic