Ophis ὄφις

Ophis (ὄφις), serpent. In Hippolytus’ report on the Naassenes it does two jobs in a single sentence: it names the being the group is said to hymn, and it glosses the foreign word naas from which their name derives.

Hekhal renders it “serpent” and not “snake” or “dragon”. “Snake” sits at too low a register for a being the text says is the object of hymns; “dragon” imports the vocabulary of Revelation, which this passage does not use and whose associations would prejudge how the figure is meant.

What the report does with it

The framing is entirely the refuter’s: those who have dared to hymn the serpent that became the cause of the deception. The identification with the serpent of Genesis 3 is Hippolytus’ own move, made in the act of introducing the group, and the reader should notice that it arrives before any of the group’s own material is quoted. Whether the Naassenes understood their naas as that serpent, as a different one, or as something the identification does not capture, is not something this sentence establishes.

Cross-tradition resonance

• Naas (gnostic-tradition) — the Hebrew loanword; the two words stand side by side in Refutatio 5.6.3, and Hekhal keeps them apart in English so the derivation stays visible.

Hekhal Editorial. "Ophis." Hekhal: An Open Reference for Esoteric Tradition. Last modified May 2, 2026. https://hekhal.org/lexicon/ophis.

Hekhal Editorial. 2026. "Ophis." Hekhal: An Open Reference for Esoteric Tradition. https://hekhal.org/lexicon/ophis.

Hekhal Editorial. "Ophis." Hekhal: An Open Reference for Esoteric Tradition, May 2, 2026, hekhal.org/lexicon/ophis.

Hekhal Editorial. (2026). Ophis. Hekhal: An Open Reference for Esoteric Tradition. https://hekhal.org/lexicon/ophis

@misc{hekhal-lexicon-ophis-2026,
  author       = {{Hekhal Editorial}},
  title        = {{Ophis}},
  year         = {2026},
  publisher    = {{Hekhal: An Open Reference for Esoteric Tradition}},
  url          = {https://hekhal.org/lexicon/ophis},
  urldate      = {[date accessed]}
}