Church law has a name for the sin of buying a spiritual office. It’s called simony, and it’s named after a man who gets sixteen verses in the Book of Acts. He’s there, he offers the apostles cash, and he gets told off.

That’s how most Christians remember Simon Magus, if they remember him at all. The bishops who hunted heretics in the second century remembered him for something much stranger. They said he traveled around the eastern Mediterranean with a woman named Helen, whom he’d found working in a brothel in Tyre, and that he taught she was the first Thought of God, fallen into the world and waiting to be rescued.

I’ve been reading Hans Jonas’s chapter on Simon in The Gnostic Religion, and it’s one of the oddest stories in the whole Gnostic record. It’s also a compact version of a myth this site keeps coming back to.

The Sorcerer in Acts

Acts 8 opens with the apostle Philip preaching in Samaria. Before Philip arrived, a man named Simon had been practicing sorcery there for a long time, and the whole city followed him. According to the NIV, people high and low said, “This man is rightly called the Great Power of God.”

Then Philip shows up with the gospel and actual miracles. Simon is impressed enough to be baptized, and he trails Philip around, astonished by what he sees.

The trouble starts when Peter and John come up from Jerusalem. They lay their hands on the new believers, the believers receive the Holy Spirit, and Simon wants that trick for himself. He offers them money for it. Peter’s answer is the line that made his name a vocabulary word: “May your money perish with you, because you thought you could buy the gift of God with money!”

Simon asks Peter to pray for him, and that’s the last Acts says about him. He walks off the page still asking.

The Father of All Heresy

The church fathers didn’t let him walk off. Jonas says they regarded Simon as “the father of all heresy,” and a whole shelf of writers took a turn at him. Justin Martyr, who grew up in Samaria himself, wrote about the Simonians in the middle of the second century. Irenaeus, Hippolytus, Tertullian and Epiphanius followed, along with a pair of early Christian novels known as the Pseudo-Clementines, where Simon and Peter argue at length.

Jonas is careful about one thing. Scholars have seriously doubted whether the Simon of Acts and the Simon of the heresy hunters are even the same person. And whoever the second Simon was, his movement doesn’t look like a Christian splinter group.

In none of the reports does the sect give Jesus a role of his own, except as an earlier appearance of Simon. Jonas reads that as a rival religion with its own origins. If the fathers made a non-Christian prophet the founder of every heresy, he points out, they were admitting without meaning to that Gnosticism didn’t start inside the church.

The Thought That Fell

Here’s the myth, as Irenaeus reports it and Jonas pieces it together. Before anything else, there was one supreme Power, and the first thing it did was think. That Thought, called the Ennoia in Greek, was female, and the report calls her “the universal mother.”

She saw what the Father intended and went down to the lower regions ahead of him. There she gave birth to angels and powers, and they made this world.

Then they turned on her. They didn’t want anyone to know they’d come from somewhere else, so they held her captive. The Father, the account adds, “was totally unknown to them.”

What follows is the part that shocked the fathers:

“And she suffered all manner of abuse from them, that she might not return upward to her Father, and this went so far that she was even enclosed in human flesh and migrated for centuries as from vessel to vessel into different female bodies.”

She was born again and again as a woman, and wherever she appeared, the powers fought over her. One of those lives was Helen of Troy. The report says the Trojan War was fought over her, and that in it “Greeks and barbarians beheld a phantasm of the truth.”

Her last life brought her down to a brothel in Tyre. The report calls her there “the ’lost sheep,’” borrowing the parable from the gospels.

Rescued From Tyre

Then God came down after her, and here the story takes its boldest turn. The God who came down was Simon.

Jonas notes that wherever Irenaeus writes “He” for the Father, Simon himself said “I.” Simon claimed to be the original Power who had thought the Thought in the first place.

To slip past the angels, he said, he changed his form in every heaven on the way down, until he looked like a man among men. Epiphanius quotes him describing it in the first person. “In every heaven I took on a different form,” Simon says, and he did it “that I might remain concealed from the ruling angels and descend to the Ennoia.”

So the woman from the brothel was traveling with the husband who had come to bring her home. Saving her was the first step in saving everyone. Whoever trusted in Simon and his Helena was rescued “by his grace,” Irenaeus says, and not by righteous deeds, since the rules about good and bad works had been invented by the angels to keep people enslaved.

It’s a love story in the oldest sense, a god crossing the whole universe for one woman. It’s also, let’s be honest, an incredible pitch for a traveling holy man. Jonas calls it “showmanship” and says the “picturesqueness and effrontery of the exhibition should be savored by itself.”

What the Brothel Means

A modern reader’s first instinct is to assume the fathers invented the brothel to smear Simon. Jonas pushes back on that hard. In a footnote he says that explaining the whore away robs Simon, “unjustly, and unnecessarily,” of an original and provocative trait.

The scandal is the theology. Jonas explains that the image of the harlot shows “the depth to which the divine principle has sunk by becoming involved in the creation.” If the Thought of God could end up there, being bought and sold by strangers, then nowhere is too low for the divine to be found. The story makes that point with no softening at all.

Helena was also called Selene, the Moon, and Jonas thinks the figure grew out of an old moon goddess. The moon wanes and comes back, and old myths sometimes told that as an abduction and a rescue. Simon is said to have had thirty disciples too, and Jonas reads that as a lunar number.

You may recognize the outline by now. A divine female figure, a fall, an imprisonment by lower powers, a rescuer from above. Jonas notes that the lunar thirty shows up again in the Valentinian system, where Sophia, the Wisdom who fell, is the last of thirty aeons. Simon’s Helen is that myth with a home address.

Helen Shows Up at Nag Hammadi

Simon left no writings of his own, and his Helen never appears in the Nag Hammadi codices. Another Helen does. A short treatise called the Exegesis on the Soul tells the soul’s story as a woman who leaves her Father’s house, falls into the hands of many lovers, becomes a prostitute, and finally repents. To make its point, it quotes Homer’s Helen, in Marvin Meyer’s translation:

My heart turned away from me. I want to return to my own house. She sighed and said: Aphrodite deceived me and brought me out of my village.

The writer explains that when the soul is deceived into leaving her perfect husband, she suffers harm, “But if she sighs and repents, she will be restored to her house.” It’s Simon’s myth turned inward, with no traveling magician required. The fallen woman is every soul, and the rescue begins with her own sigh.

Once you’ve read Simon’s version, the voice in Thunder, Perfect Mind sounds different too. “I am the whore and the holy,” she says. Paul-Hubert Poirier’s introduction to that text in Meyer’s volume even names the Simonian Wisdom of the Pseudo-Clementines as perhaps the best illustration of who the speaker is.

Reading It Without Getting Conned

I don’t think you have to believe Simon was God to get something from this story. Here’s how I’ve been reading it.

  • Read Acts 8:9-24 and then the summary from Irenaeus, and notice that every word we have about Simon comes from his enemies. Jonas admits the Christian sources “draw a none too sympathetic picture.” Ask what a Simonian would have said back.
  • Think about the part of your own life you’d file under “lost.” The myth’s claim is that the lowest place the Thought of God ended up is still the Thought of God. The Exegesis on the Soul says the way back starts with something as small as a sigh.
  • Watch out for anyone who casts himself as the rescuer in your story. Simon’s myth is beautiful, and his own role in it is awfully convenient. The Nag Hammadi writer kept the myth and dropped the magician, and I think that was the better choice.

Simon’s afterlife is the strangest part of all. The Christian sources say he went to Rome, performed at the imperial court, and died trying to fly. Jonas adds that in Latin settings Simon went by the name Faustus, “the favoured one,” and that this magician with a reborn Helen of Troy at his side is one of the sources of the Faust legend.

So when Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus conjures up Helen and marvels at the face that launched a thousand ships, he’s replaying a scene from Samaria. Jonas says few admirers of Marlowe and Goethe have any inkling that their hero descends from a Gnostic sectary. The beautiful Helen he summons was once the fallen Thought of God, and her rescue was supposed to save the world.

Acts 8:9-24 is quoted and summarized from the NIV. The account of Simon, the quotations from Irenaeus (Against Heresies 1.23, which Jonas supplements from parallel accounts) and Epiphanius, and the discussion of Helena, the moon, and the Faust legend come from Hans Jonas, The Gnostic Religion (Beacon, 3rd ed., 2001), chapter 4. The Exegesis on the Soul (NHC II,6) and Thunder (NHC VI,2) are quoted from Marvin Meyer’s translations in The Nag Hammadi Scriptures (HarperOne, 2010), which also includes Paul-Hubert Poirier’s introduction to Thunder.