Mysteries of the Bridechamber by Victoria LePage

Author:Victoria LePage [Victoria]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Inner Traditions/Bear & Company
Published: 2011-05-14T04:00:00+00:00

A PHILOSOPHY OF FIRE

Simon Magus and Dositheus were contemporaries of Jesus who were preaching in Palestine shortly after the Crucifixion. Their religious philosophy is very different from that of Jesus, yet is clearly a formative stage in the evolution of the Hebrew Old Religion into the new Christ Mystery. The modern scholar Jean Daniélou says that Dositheus (or Dosthai in the Jewish sources) came from Cochaba near Damascus, which we know was the site of Essene, Nazarean, and Ebionite communities, and that he was Simon’s teacher.44 Daniélou also suggests that the Sethians, followers of Dositheus, worshipped John the Baptist as a very great spiritual teacher and as the Righteous Teacher of the Last Days,45 thus implying that Dositheus himself was a member of the Johannine school.

The allusion to the Righteousness lineage also points to John’s Hasidean connections—even that he himself may have been in the direct dynastic line of the Zadokite high priests. However, the Recognitions implicitly denies that Simon, the so-called black magician who is so unjustly vilified in the Acts of the Apostles (8:9–24), was a pupil of Dositheus. Rather, it states that the two famous Samaritan adepts trained together as codisciples in John’s Hemerobaptist school and succeeded him as its leaders after his death. Both were working publicly only a decade after Jesus’ death, in the reign of the Roman emperor Claudius (41–54 CE).

John’s Hemerobaptist teachings evidently provided a rich source of mystery material from which a number of revolutionary currents of thought were drawn, as the Hasidean movement comprised a variety of diverse schools and teachings, some more mystical than others, some hewing to an orthodox line, others more militaristic; and so the crisis of the age brought forth from the movement a cluster of Savior figures rather than one alone. Dr. Stephan Hoeller, the director of the Gnostic Society of Los Angeles and an Associate Professor of Comparative Religions at the College of Oriental Studies in that city, says of the two famous magi that after their apprenticeship to John,

both Simon and Doshtai declared themselves messianic savior figures and traveled the roads of the Roman world, preaching and conferring mysteries. It is by no means unlikely that these two men, who like Jesus were initiated by John the Baptist, were infused with the power of the messianic archetype and acted as alternative savior figures side-by-side with Jesus.46

Simon and Dositheus became outstanding spiritual teachers in Egypt, Asia Minor, Rome, and Samaria, itinerant prophets and sages celebrated for their wisdom and magical powers and for their unprecedented support for the dignity of womanhood. Both called themselves Christs, “Anointed Ones,” and preached the Gnosis revealed. The mystico-magical movements centered on them. The Sethian teachings of Dositheus found a particularly prominent place in the religious traditions of Asia Minor and Mesopotamia for about six centuries, whereas the movement founded by Simon the Magician, who was from the Samaritan village of Gitta but Greek educated in Alexandria (as well as being famous in Ephesus and Rome), was not crushed by Christianity until the fourth century.

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