This very question, however, whether the first principle were to be regarded as single or twofold was one on which the Valentinians themselves were not agreed; and their differences as to the manner of counting the numbers of the primary Ogdoad confirm what has been said as to the later origin of this doctrine.
22.
Though this Ogdoad is first in order of evolution, if the Valentinian theory be accepted as true, yet to us who trace the history of the development of that system the lower Ogdoad must clearly be pronounced the first, and the higher only as a subsequent extension of the previously accepted action of an Ogdoad.
23.
Though this Ogdoad is first in order of evolution, if the Valentinian theory be accepted as true, yet to us who trace the history of the development of that system the lower Ogdoad must clearly be pronounced the first, and the higher only as a subsequent extension of the previously accepted action of an Ogdoad.
24.
Though this Ogdoad is first in order of evolution, if the Valentinian theory be accepted as true, yet to us who trace the history of the development of that system the lower Ogdoad must clearly be pronounced the first, and the higher only as a subsequent extension of the previously accepted action of an Ogdoad.
25.
The mostly gnostic Nag Hammadi Library, discovered in 1945, also contained one previously unknown hermetic text called " The Ogdoad and the Ennead ", a description of a hermetic initiation into gnosis that has led to new perspectives on the nature of Hermetism as a whole, particularly due to the research of Jean-Pierre Mah?
26.
With further reference to the " sign of life ", i . e . the infinity symbol and its connection with the number 8, it may be remembered that Christian Gnosticism speaks of rebirth in Christ as a change " unto the Ogdoad . " The mystic number is termed Jerusalem above, the Land flowing with Milk and Honey, the Holy Spirit and the Land of the Lord.
27.
The first divine act is the creation of the cosmos, described in several Ogdoad, who represent the chaos that precedes creation, give birth to the sun god, who establishes order in the newly formed world; Ptah, who embodies thought and creativity, gives form to all things by envisioning and naming them; Atum produces all things as emanations of himself; These and other versions of the events of creation were not seen as contradictory.
28.
Within a few sentences, the writer was holding forth on Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle and " the concept of nothing " as the empty set, before launching into speculations involving number theory : " And if 1 is excluded from being prime . . . . it's enough to make me conjecture that infinity's prime and Riemann's Zeta function accounts for fractional charge subatomically just for the Higg's boson with an involucral matrix of ogdoad parity as midwife !"
29.
After describing the manifestation of the Gospel in the Ogdoad and Hebdomad, he adds that the Basilidians have a long account of the innumerable creations and powers in the several'stages'of the upper world ( " diastemata " ), in which they speak of 365 heavens and say that " their great archon " is Abrasax, because his name contains the number 365, the number of the days in the year; i . e . the sum of the numbers denoted by the Greek letters in ??????? according to the rules of isopsephy is 365:
