DeConick A.D

221
HELL WALKS AND STAR TREKS
as the planetary power that controls the generation of souls. So the gateway
for souls ascending out of the underworld is likely the nocturnal
house of Taurus, the ascent star gate that Venus rules.
At Venus’s gate, the initiates chant a prayer of demonic defeat they
have learned from Psalms 24:7–9: “Your leaders, lift up the gates! Ancient
doors be lifted up! That the King of Glory may come in!” Who is the
King of Glory? It is the initiate who has been mighty in battle, contesting
successfully with the heterosexual body as a young hermaphrodite. The
initiate shouts out the secret password “ zeesar ,” a reference to the Hebrew
phrase “ ze’êr sham ,” which, like “ saulasau ,” the Naassenes had lifted from
Isaiah 28:13 (Hippolytus, Refutation 5.8.4). With these words of power,
the star gate opens to them. As a communal display of their new status as
ephêbos (youth), the initiates’ bodies are anointed with a very special oil
from the horn of David (5.9.21–22).
At the third level, the initiate’s spirit becomes an adult man equal to Perfect
Man. In the previous stages of initiation, the body had been stripped
from the soul, and the soul had been stripped from the spirit. Now the
naked spirits, as bridegrooms, walk through Venus’s star gate and stand
at the edge of the universe. They wish to enter the transcendent realm,
the house of God (5.8.44–45). They now call out a third password, also
derived from Isaiah 28:13: “ kaulakau ” (Hippolytus, Refutation 5.8.4).
When the Son of Man who guards the house of God hears this, he
greets them as his own. As a communal display of their new status as
Adamas’s bridegrooms who have returned to the realm of the Unoriginate,
they are fed milk and honey. Its taste is transformative (5.8.30). The
initiates become the hermaphrodite God himself. The initiates have risen
from the dead, ascended through the spheres, and entered God’s home
through heaven’s gate (5.7.24).
Standing Sethians
The Sethians, the biblical Gnostics we met in chapter 3, had many names
for themselves, including the Kingless Race, the Children of Seth, and
the Immobiles or Standers (see Williams 1985). They were the first people
to have blended Gnostic spirituality with the Bible, in a context before
Christianity. So they have a fairly long history, going back to at least the
beginning of the first century CE, when the Jewish philosopher Philo was