“The Sibylline Books at that period seem to have been regarded with extraordinary favor. One can easily perceive that they were inspired from the same source as those of the Gentile nations. Here is a leaf from Gallaeus:
“New Light has arisen: Coming from Heaven, it assumed a mortal form. … Virgin, receive God in thy pure bosom. And the Word flew into her womb: becoming incarnate in Time, and animated by her body, it was found in a mortal image, and a Boy was created by a Virgin. … The new God-sent Star was adored by the Magi, the infant swathed was shown in a manger. … And Bethlehem was called “God-called country of the Word.”
This looks at first sight like a prophecy of Jesus. But could it not mean as well some other creative God? We have like utterances concerning Bacchus and Mithras:
“I, son of Deus, am come to the land of the Thebans – Bacchus whom formerly Semele (the Virgin), the daughter of Kadmus (the man from the East) brings forth – being delivered by the lightning-bearing flame; and having taken a mortal form instead of God’s, I have arrived.”
The Dionysiacs, written in the fifth century, serve to render this matter very clear, and even to show its close connection with the Christian legend of the birth of Jesus:
“Kore-Persephoneia … you were wives as the Dragon’s spouse, when Zeus, very coiled, his form and countenance changed, a Dragon-Bridegroom, coiled in love-inspiring fold … Glided to dark Kore’s maiden couch… Thus, by the alliance with the Dragon of Aether, the womb of Persephone became alive with fruit, bearing Zagreus, the Horned Child.”
Here we have the secret of the Ophite worship, and the origin of the Christian later-revised fable of the immaculate conception. The Gnostics were the earliest Christians with anything like a regular theological system, and it is only too evident that it was Jesus who was made to fit their theology as Christos, and not their theology that was developed out of his sayings and doings.
Their ancestors had maintained, before the Christian era, that the Great Serpent, Jupiter, the Dragon of Life, the Father and “Good Divinity”, had glided into the couch of Semele, and now, the post-Christian Gnostics, with a very trifling change, applied the same fable to the man Jesus, and asserted that the same “Good Divinity”, Saturn (Ilda-Baoth), had, in the shape of the Dragon of Life, glided over the cradle of the infant Mary. In their eyes, the serpent was the Logos, Christos, the incarnation of Divine Wisdom, through his Father Ennola and Mother Sophia.
“Now my mother, the Holy Spirit (Holy Ghost) took me”, Jesus is made to say in the Gospel of the Hebrews, thus entering upon his part of Christos – the Son of Sophia, the Holy Spirit.
“The Holy Ghost shall come upon thee, and the Power of the Highest shall overshadow thee; therefore, that holy thing which shall be born of thee shall be called Son of God”, says the angel. (Luke 1:35)
“God… hath at the last of these days spoken to us by a Son, whom he hath appointed heir of all things, by whom also he made the Aeons.” (Paul, Hebrews 1)
All such expressions are so many Christian quotations from the Nonnus verse” …through the Aethereal Draconteum”, for Ether is the Holy Ghost or third person of the Trinity – the Hawk-Headed Serpent, the Egyptian Kneph, emblem of the Divine Mind, and Plato’s Universal Soul.
“I, Wisdom, came out of the mouth of the Most High, and covered the earth as a cloud.”
Pimander, the Logos, issues from the Infinite Darkness, and covers the earth with clouds which, serpentine-like, spread all over the earth (see Champollion’s Egypte). The Logos is the oldest image of God, and he is the active Logos, says Philo. The Father is the Latent Thought. This idea being universal we find an identical phraseology to express it among Pagans, Jews, and early Christians. The Chaldeo-Persian Logos is the Only Begotten of the Father in the Babylonian cosmogony of Eudemus. “Hymn now, ELI, child of Deus”, begins a Homeric hymn to the sun. Sol-Mithra is an “image of the Father”, as the kabalistic Seir-Anpin.”
H. P. Blavatsky
The Mark Of God: Understanding Your "I AM Presence" 