her beauty, she drove them to frenzy, and on this account was she sent for the despoiling of the Rulers who brought the world into being; and the Angels themselves went to war on her account; and while she experienced nothing, they set to work to mutually slaughter each other on account of the desire which she infused into them for herself.  And constraining her so that she could not reaescend, each had intercourse with her in every body of womanly and female constitution—­she reincarnating from female bodies into different bodies, both of the human kingdom, and of beasts and other things—­in order that by means of their slaying and being slain, they might bring about a diminution of themselves through the shedding of blood, and that then she by collecting again the Power would be enabled to reaescend into heaven.

3.  And she it was at that time who was possessed by the Greeks and Trojans; and that both in the night of time before the world existed, and after its existence, by the invisible Powers she had wrought things of a like nature.  “And she it is who is now with me, and on her account have I descended.  And she was looking for my coming.  For she is the Thought,[46] called Helen in Homer.”  And it was on this account that Homer was compelled to portray her as standing on a tower, and by means of a torch revealing to the Greeks the plot of the Phrygians.  And by the torch, he delineated, as I said, the manifestation of the light from above.  On which account also the wooden horse in Homer was devised, which the Greeks think was made for a distinct purpose, whereas the sorcerer maintained that this is the ignorance of the Gentiles, and that like as the Phrygians when they dragged it along in ignorance drew on their own destruction, so also the Gentiles, that is to say people who are “without my wisdom,” through ignorance, draw ruin on themselves.  Moreover the impostor said that Athena again was identical with what they called Thought, making use forsooth of the words of the holy apostle Paul—­changing the truth into his own lie—­to wit:  “Put on the breastplate of faith and the helmet of salvation, and the greaves and sword and buckler";[47] and that all this was in the mimes of Philistion,[48] the rogue!—­words uttered by the apostle with firm reasoning and faith of holy conversation, and the power of the divine and heavenly word—­turning them further into a joke and nothing more.  For what does he say?  That he (Philistion) arranged all these things in a mysterious manner into types of Athena.  Wherefore again, in making known the woman with him whom he had taken from Tyre and who had the same name as Helen of old, he spoke as I have told you above, calling her by all those names, Thought, and Athena, and Helen and the rest.  “And on her account,” he says, “I descended.  And this is the ‘lost sheep’ written of in the Gospel.”  Moreover, he left to his followers an image, his own presumably, and they worship it under the form