The fathers tell us that Simon went about with a woman called Helena or Helen, who Justin Martyr says had formerly been a prostitute.[1610] Simon is said to have called her the mother of all, through whom God had created the angels and aeons, who in their turn had formed the world and men. These cosmic powers had then, however, cast her down to earth, where she had been confined in various successive human and animal bodies. She seems to have obtained her name of Helen from the fact that it was for her that the Trojan war had been fought, an event which Simon seems to have subjected to much allegorical interpretation. He also spoke of Helen as “the lost sheep,” whom he, the Great Power, had descended from heaven to release from the bonds of the flesh. She was that Thought or Holy Spirit which we have heard him say he came down to recover. Simon’s Helen also corresponds to Pistis-Sophia, who in the extant Gnostic work named after her descends through the twelve aeons, deceived by a lion-faced power whom they have formed to mislead her, and then reascends by the aid of Jesus or the true light. It seems fairly evident that the fathers[1611] have taken literally and travestied by a scandalous application to an actual woman a beautiful Gnostic myth or allegory concerning the human soul. At the same time Simon’s Helen reminds us of Jesus’s relations with the woman taken in adultery, the woman of Samaria, and Mary Magdalene. Mary Magdalene, it may be noted, in the Gnostic writing, _Pistis-Sophia_, takes a rôle superior to the twelve disciples, a fact of which Peter complains to his Lord more than once. But Simon’s Helen was that spirit of truth which lies latent in the human mind and which he endeavored to release by means of the philosophy, astrology, and magic of his time. May modern scientific method prove more successful in setting the prisoner free! [Sidenote: The number thirty and the moon.]