Irenaeus of Lyons · a new plain-English translation from the original language
HOW THEY EXPOUND CREATION AS HAVING BEEN MADE I want to relate to you also how they say that creation itself was fashioned by the Demiurge -- while he himself was unaware of it -- after the image of the invisible things, through the agency of the Mother. First, they say that the four elements -- fire, water, earth, air -- stand forth as an image of the Quaternion above; and they carefully enumerate the properties associated with them, that is, hot and cold, moist and dry. They say there are seven bodies, which they also call heavens; and after these, the circle containing them, which they call the eighth heaven; and after that, the sun and the moon. Since these are ten in number, they say these picture that unseen decad brought forth by Logos and Zoe. And they display the duodecad through the circle called the zodiac. For they hold that the twelve signs quite openly picture, as if through a sort of shadow, the duodecad, offspring of Anthropos and Ecclesia. And, on the other hand, they say that the heaven set above, which bears down upon that concave sphere, and, though itself the swiftest, moderates the velocity of the lower spheres by its own contrary slowness -- so that it completes its circuit from sign to sign in thirty years -- is an image of their Horos, who encompasses the Mother of their Thirty. And the moon, again, they say, traces out its own circuit in its proper measure. And the sun, going around in twelve months and completing its circular restoration, manifests the duodecad through its twelve months. And the days themselves, having a measure of twelve hours, are the type of the duodecad which does not appear. And the hour too, they say, which is a twelfth part of the day, is adorned with thirty parts, as an image of the triacontad. And the entire circumference of the zodiacal circle measures three hundred and sixty parts, since each of the signs has thirty parts. Thus too, they say, through the circle is preserved the image of the conjunction of these twelve with the thirty. Further, they say the earth is divided into twelve climatic zones, and that in each zone the days themselves diminish accordingly; indeed, they maintain that this whole arrangement, receiving power from the heavens by way of descent, and producing offspring like to the power that sent down that distillation, is a most manifest type of the duodecad and its children.
Besides this, they say that the Demiurge, wishing to imitate the boundless, eternal, infinite, and timeless nature of the ogdoad above, but being unable -- since he is the fruit of a defect -- to reproduce its abiding and perpetual character, deposited its eternity instead into spans of time, and times, and numbers of many years, supposing that by a multitude of times he could imitate its boundlessness. Here, they say, truth escaped him and falsehood followed after; and for this reason his work, when its times are fulfilled, will meet with destruction.