Soul divided in three (1)

Text
Hippolytus, Refutatio 5.7.9-15:
And first, since they (= Naassenes) envisage the threefold division of mankind, they take refuge in the rites of the Assyrians. For the Assyrians are the first who have held that the soul is divided in three, (yet) also one. For, they say, every species seeks after soul, but in different ways. For the soul is the cause of everything that takes nourishment and grows requires a soul. For nothing, he says, is able to obtain either nourishment or growth if a soul is not present. Even the stones, he says, have souls; for they possess the power of growth. And growth could never take place without nourishment; for the things that grow, grow by adding (to themselves); and the addition is the nourishment of the thing that takes nourishment. So every species, he says, “of things in heaven and things on earth and things under the earth” seeks after soul. And the Assyrians call this Adonis or Endymion. And when it is called Adonis, he says, then Aphrodite loves and desires the soul of this name; and Aphrodite for them means generation. But when Persephone, who is also called Kore, loves Adonis, then, he says, the soul is something mortal, separated from the generation that belongs to Aphrodite. And if Selene comes to desire of Endymion and to love of form (or: formation), the higher creation, he says, also requires soul. But if, he says, the mother of the gods castrates Attis, though she too is in love with him, then, he says, the sublime and blessed nature of the supercelestial and eternal (realities) recalls the masculine power of the soul to herself. For Man, they say, is bisexual. So in accordance with this thought of theirs, the intercourse of woman with man is in their teaching shown to be most wicked and prohibited. For, he says, Attis was castrated, that is, (cut off) from the earthly parts of the creation (here) below, and has gone over to the eternal substance above where, he says, there is neither female nor male, but a new creature, “a new man,” who is bisexual.

Source (list of abbreviations)
Hippolytus, Refutatio 5.7.9-15

Bibliography

Amar Annus

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