was made prisoner by the Powers and Angels that has been emanated by her.  And she suffered every kind of indignity at their hands, to prevent her reaescending to her Father, even to being imprisoned in the human body and transmigrating into other female bodies, as from one vessel into another.[7] She also was in that Helen, on whose account the Trojan War arose; wherefore also Stesichorus[8] was deprived of his sight when he spake evil of her in his poems; and that afterwards when he repented and wrote what is called a recantation, in which he sang her praises, he recovered his sight.  So she, transmigrating from body to body, and thereby also continually undergoing indignity, last of all even stood for hire in a brothel; and she was the “lost sheep.”

3.  Wherefore also he himself had come, to take her away for the first time, and free her from her bonds, and also to guarantee salvation to men by his “knowledge.”  For as the Angels were mismanaging the world, since each of them desired the sovereignty, he had come to set matters right; and that he had descended, transforming himself and being made like to the Powers and Principalities and Angels; so that he appeared to men as a man, although he was not a man; and was thought to have suffered in Judaea, although he did not really suffer.  The Prophets moreover had spoken their prophecies under the inspiration of the Angels who made the world; wherefore those who believed on him and his Helen paid no further attention to them, and followed their own pleasure as though free; for men were saved by his grace, and not by righteous works.  For righteous actions are not according to nature, but from accident, in the manner that the Angels who made the world have laid it down, by such precepts enslaving men.  Wherefore also he gave new promises that the world should be dissolved and that they who were his should be freed from the rule of those who made the world.

4.  Wherefore their initiated priests live immorally.  And everyone of them practises magic arts to the best of his ability.  They use exorcisms and incantations.  Love philtres also and spells and what are called “familiars” and “dream-senders,” and the rest of the curious arts are assiduously cultivated by them.  They have also an image of Simon made in the likeness of Jupiter, and of Helen in that of Minerva; and they worship the (statues); and they have a designation from their most impiously minded founder, being called Simonians, from whom the Gnosis, falsely so-called, derives its origins, as one can learn from their own assertions.

iii.  Clemens Alexandrinus (Stromateis, ii. 11; vii. 17).  Text:  Opera (edidit G. Dindorfius); Oxoniae, 1869.

In the first passage the Simonian use of the term, “He who stood,” is confirmed, in the latter we are told that a branch of the Simonians was called Entychitae.

iv.  Tertullianus, or Pseudo-Tertullianus (De Praescriptionibus, 46).  Text:  Liber de Praes., etc. (edidit H. Hurter, S.J.); Oeniponti, 1870.  Tertullianus (De Anima, 34, 36).  Text:  Bibliothec.  Patr.  Eccles.  Select. (curavit Dr. Guil.  Bruno Linder), Fasc. iv; Lipsiae, 1859.