A sect of Christians, the followers of Heracleon, who refined upon the Gnostic divinity, and maintained that the world was not the immediate production of the Son of God, but that he was only the occasional cause of its being created by the demiurgus. The Heracleonites denied the authority of the prophecies of the Old Testament; maintained that they were mere random sounds in the air; and that St. John the Baptist was the only true voice that directed to the Messiah.