ogdoad

Valentinus dabbled in a divine world of "Fullness" ("Pleroma"), with a basic male-female duality of the Ineffable and Silence, producing more pairs down to the first Ogdoad, in turn spawning more down to the final thirty "Aeons of the Pleroma," the youngest and feeblest being Sophia (Wisdom) from whose frailty there emerged both creation and creator, with human souls clothed in flesh, divided into three classes until the heavenly Jesus sends down the earthly Christ to instruct them in real wisdom that they may return to their true celestial home.

As this larger pattern typically consisted of eight parts, Frye referred to it appropriately as an ogdoad. This grand design came to him initially at an early age and went through several heuristic transformations over the years.

For example, Jean-Pierre Mahe's two excellent contributions, on "Gnostic and Hermetic Ethics" and on the Nag Hammadi Discourse on the Ogdoad and the Ennead, provide good samples of his provocative argument for greater attention to the place of ethics and ritual in the Hermetic tradition.

Nor can it be said in all localities that triads preponderate over dyads, tetrads, or the famous Ogdoad. Nevertheless, they are certainly both important and ubiquitous; and that, as Griffiths now proceeds to argue, was not true in any other region of the ancient world.