The library · Edition and sources
On the Origin of the World
Samuel Zinner, edited by Mark M. Mattison; Other Gospels · Translated text
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Chapter 24
1. So, when Sophia Zoe witnessed the archons of the darkness putting a curse on her companions, she grew furious, and exiting the first heaven with plenary power, she hounded those archons, ejecting them from out of [their] heavens, and threw them down into the world of transgression, to make them dwell there in the form of wicked demons on the earth.
2. [She dispatched a bird], ⟦page 122⟧ which in their world would spend its thousand years in Paradise, a living creature imbued with soul, called “phoenix.”
3. It dies by suicide and revivifies itself, in order to be a witness to the judgment (decreed) against them, because they mistreated Adam and his race, even to the consummation of the age.
4. There are three men, as well as their descendants, to the consummation of the world: those imbued with spirit, and those imbued with soul, and the earthly.
5. Similarly, the three phoenixes ‹inside› Paradise: the first is deathless, the second lives for 1,000 years.
6. Of the third it is written in the sacred Scripture that it is consumed.
7. Similarly, as well, there are three baptisms: the first is spiritual, the second is with fire, the third is with water.
8. Precisely as the phoenix symbolizes the angels, so is the case of the water hydri in Egypt, which symbolizes those who descend into the baptism of a true man.
9. The two bulls in Egypt possess a symbolic meaning, namely, the sun and moon, which is a symbol of Sabaoth, on account of Sophia obtaining the universe from the day that she fashioned the sun and the moon, placing a seal on her heaven, until the age ends.
10. And the worm born out of the phoenix is also symbolic of a human being, of which it is written, “the just man will blossom like a phoenix,” and the phoenix appears first alive, and dies, and rises again, functioning as a symbol of what will happen at the consummation of the age.
11. These powerful symbols appeared solely in Egypt, not elsewhere, to indicate ⟦page 123⟧ that it resembles the Paradise of God.