The Naassene Sermon: The Gnostic Primal Man
The people who wrote this sermon called themselves, in their own tongue, the followers of the serpent. We know them only through an enemy. In the early third century, Hippolytus of Rome compiled a long work against heresies, the Refutation of All Heresies, and in its fifth book he copied out, at length, a sermon of a group he named the Naassenes.
He meant to show how absurd it was. By accident, he saved one of the strangest and most learned pieces of early Gnostic thought.
A Hostile Witness
Hippolytus says that the name Naassene comes from the Hebrew word nahash, "serpent." The group, he writes, honored the serpent as a principle of moisture and of life. He also says the Naassenes claimed to have a secret tradition from James, the brother of the Lord, passed down through a woman named Mariamne. Whether this claim was true, or only a boast, we cannot say.
The sermon itself is an odd piece of work. It mixes the Gospels, the letters of Paul, Homer, the mysteries of Phrygia and the Greek poets into a running commentary. Many scholars suspect that Hippolytus quotes an older text that was revised over time, since parts of it seem barely Christian.
We should keep in mind that we read a summary chosen by a critic, and that the sermon may have been less tidy, or more varied, than his version.
The Primal Man
The center of the sermon is a figure called Adamas, the First or Primal Man. According to the text, before the world there was a heavenly human being who contained all things. This Man has three parts: the mind, the soul and the earthly. Humans, being made in his image, were thought to carry the same three parts.
In this picture, the visible world is a fall, or a scattering, of the Man into many pieces. Humans are bits of a once-whole being, and our task is to recollect the whole. The idea is a Gnostic cousin of the old myth in which a divine figure is broken apart and later regathered.
Many Mysteries, One Story
The most striking feature is how widely the preacher reads. He says that the same Man is meant in the rites of the Phrygians, where Attis, the young god of the goddess Cybele, is honored in song. He also finds him in the mysteries of Eleusis, in the verses of Homer and in the sayings of Jesus.
All the old religions, in this reading, were fragments of one truth, and the one who understood could hear it in each of them.
This method, which finds a hidden unity under different names, was common in the ancient world, and it was later used by Neoplatonists and others. Modern scholars may call it allegory. For the Naassenes it was the way knowledge unlocked the meaning of tradition.
The Serpent
Why a serpent? In the ancient world the snake was a double sign. It stood for danger and for healing, as in the staff of Asclepius. It sheds its skin, it clings to the earth and it hides in the water and in holes. For the Naassenes, as Hippolytus reports, the serpent was a hidden mover in all things, the moist stuff of life.
The group's treatment of Eden may also have turned the usual story around, as other serpent-honoring Gnostics did, though the sermon's details are hard to follow. We should avoid claiming more than the text supports.
Why It Matters
Before the discovery of the Nag Hammadi library in 1945, works like the Naassene Sermon were among the few Gnostic voices that scholars could study, and nearly all of them came through the quotations of opponents such as Hippolytus, Irenaeus and Epiphanius.
That gives his book a double value. It is a polemic, and it is also an archive. Historians read it today for what it preserves, with care for what it distorts. The sermon shows that early Christianity grew in a crowded field of teachers who read Homer, the mysteries and the Gospels together.
A Word of Care
The rites that Hippolytus attacks the Naassenes for may be exaggerated or false, since he was an opponent, and his comments about their practices should not be taken as sure history. Anyone reading him should treat his charges with caution and look at the sermon itself.
Closing
The Naassene Sermon is a patchwork that holds together by a single hope: that every story the world tells is a piece of one story, and that the reader is a piece too. It reaches us through the pen of an enemy, which may be why it was kept.
In its pages, a lost community still speaks, quoting Homer, praising a serpent and telling its listeners that they are fragments of the First Man, waiting to be gathered.
Related Esoteric Inquiries
- Zostrianos and the High Ascent of the Gnostic Heavens
- The Paraphrase of Shem: The Gnostic Anatomy of the Cosmic Struggle
- The Treatise on the Resurrection: The Gnostic Anatomy of Spiritual Rising
Lux Esoterica.
2026.
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