Adams’s Sethians honour Seth as a heavenly figure, and beside them she sets the serpent-revering Ophians, the cluster the archive reads as the Sethian-Enochic complex.
In Hannah Adams
In Adams’s own words, from the 1817 Dictionary. Each passage is quoted verbatim under its own entry.
SETHIANS, so called because they paid high honours to Seth, whom, it is said, they looked upon to be Jesus Christ; but here (as Lardner remarks) must be some mistake* because they said Christ was descended from Seth in a miraculous way, i. e. by being born of a virgin. Perhaps they considered Seth as the promised seed: Gen. iii. 15. and iv. 20. and might suppose the pre-existent soul of Christ had animated the patriarch. They had several apocryphal books in addition to the scriptures. This denomination appeared in Egypt about the year one hundred and ninety, and continued above two hundred years, f
OPHIANS, Ophites, or Serpehtarians, seems to be the name of several sects, so called from their reverence, and in many cases worship, of the serpent. Mr. Bryant thinks this almost universally prevailed in the heathen world, and names many countries which adopted it, particularly Egypt.* The cause seems to have had its origin in the opinion, that the serpent was “ more subtle than any other beast of the field.” It is not difficult to account, therefore, for the serpent’s being an early emblem of wisdom.
There were also Ophites who were a sort of mongrel Christians, and perhaps revered the serpent as a type of Christ,f as the brazen serpent is still considered. (Johniii. 14,16.) The Ophites are considered by many authors, as a kind of Gnostics.
ARCHONTICS, a denomination which appeared about the year 175; who held that archangels created the world, denied the resurrection of the body, and maintained that the God of sabaoth exercised a cruel tyranny in heaven. They defended their doctrines by books of their own composing, styled « The Revelation of the Prophets,” and the Harmony.
Hannah Adams, A Dictionary of All Religions and Religious Denominations, 4th ed. (Boston: Cummings and Hilliard, 1817), entries “Sethians” (p. 267), “Ophians” (p. 210), “Archontics” (p. 27).