The Heresiarch's Quote

At his dinner with Borges, Bioy Casares recalls that one of Uqbar's heresiarchs had said that mirrors and copulation are abominable because they multiply the number of men. Later on, upon discovering the Uqbar entry in The Anglo-American Cyclopaedia, the exact quote is shown to be less literary: To one of these Gnostics, the visible world was an illusion or, more precisely, a sophism. Mirrors and fatherhood are abominable because they reproduce and multiply the planet.