On the Sethians

I wrote:

Another interesting thing to file away in our growing kabalistic Christian database beside the Samaritan heretic Sextus and (Epi)Simon (i.e. the sixth letter) is the realization I had today that the "Sethians" could well have been the "sixthians" viz. "ShTh" as both the number six and the name of the Son of Adam "Seth."

Just thought I would mention it (I know "six" is normally spelt ShThTh but there is a variant according to Jastrow of just ShTh).

Boid replied:

Yes, this works exactly. The base form of the number (the feminine) is sheth or shet, spelt SHIN-TAV and pronounced exactly the same as the name Sheth or Shet. The letters SHIN-TAV-TAV are the root, never a word in isolation. You can see the theoretical root in the form shitta (masculine).

Notice that all living humans are descended from Seth, whose mother was Eve and whose father was Adam; except for those metaphorically or spiritually descended from Cain, whose mother was Eve but whose father was the snake or the Satan. Notice that Jesus accuses his opponents of being descended from the Satan in John. Nevertheless, in some way Seth needs Cain. Cain is the first person to repent, and the ancestor of all those put under Divine protection. God gave him permanent protection by putting a cross on his forehead. We know it was a cross because this is the old form of the letter tav in the Hebrew (not Aramaic) alphabet. From this comes the Greek tau and the Roman T or t. Those marked with a cross on their foreheads as a sign of divine protection in the book of Revelation are the beneficiaries of God’s primordial gift to Cain. So are those marked with a cross on their foreheads in Ezekiel. (The Targum makes clear that it was a cross). In my opinion, this is the origin of the marking of the forehead with a cross after baptism. I don’t quite see WHY the descendants of Seth need the descendants of Cain, but they obviously do. Cain was the inventor of agriculture and his immediate descendants were the inventors of music and engineering. It was Cain, not Seth, that benefited from God’s promise “by the sweat of thy brow thou shalt eat bread”. To have bread you have to have a society, with a legal system; some form of money; division of labour; engineering; and transport.

I see the use of normal spelling is infectious. You typed “spelt” not “spelled”. This implies normal pronunciation of the word, with a t sound at the end.