Heresy, Concubines, Snakebite

Epiphanius’s Panarion or Medicine Chest was a compendium of heresies and their cures, and inspired an entire genre of “heresiologies.”  The book is often dismissed with some hostility by Byzantine historians, but Averil Cameron notes that it displays some literary skill.  He claims to have modeled his lists of heresies on the number of concubines mentioned in the Song of Songs, “reaching the number of eighty in all by listing seventy-five heresies and five ‘mothers of heresies,’” the latter category being drawn from Colossians 3:11.  The same number does double duty for Epiphanius: “he illustrates the numerology of the Song of Songs by counting the generations of the faithful before Christ, and the line of philosophers from Thales to Epicurus.”  Besides, the treatise is organized like a medical handbook for treating snakebite, the Satanic poison of heresy: “Epiphanius modelled the Panarion both on theSong of Songs and on scientific treatises on snake bites and poisons.”