Theos-Talk Archives (March 2004 Message tt00411)

--- In theos-talk@yahoogroups.com, Drpsionic@a... wrote:
> I just had an idea to consider which may worth something or 
absolutely 
> nothing, but there is the Gnostic tradition of Simon Magus marrying 
a prostitute 
> named Helen as symbolic of the union of the Logos and the Sophia, 
the latter 
> having been imprisoned by the Archons in the body of a prostitute. 
Could it not 
> be that the transmorgrification of Mary Magdalene into a prostitute 
was a 
> reflection of the Gnostic idea and sort of adopted by the Church 
and then corrupted 
> by it for its own ends?

That is an interesting idea. THE CLEMENTINE RECOGNITIONS has a long 
story of Simon which makes it clear he was actually the apostle Paul 
prior to his conversion. (Blavatsky wrote about that in ISIS.) In 
this version Helene was not a prostitute at all but the wife of 
Dositheus, who was Simon's original teacher. Simon married her after 
Dositheus died. Anyway in his letters Paul says never to marry a 
widow (presumably including the widow of your best friend) and he 
also says his uncontrollable lust was the reason he abrogated the 
Jewish Law. He just had a problem with the ten commandments, namely 
the one which says do not covet your neighbor's wife. It is also 
notable that one of the names by which Paul was called was Simeon and 
that there are similarities between the esoteric system of Dositheus 
described in the book and the system of Valentinus, which was 
supposed to be the esoteric system of Paul, received by Valentinus 
through Paul's disciple Theudas. Mead said in that terrible book of 
his, FRAGMENTS OF A FASITH FORGOTTEN, that nobody could make sense of 
Valentinus' system but that is not true. It is actually quite 
elegant, and relates to all sorts of esoteric meanings in Paul's 
letters. None of them would of course be suspected by the casual 
reader.

I am not suggesting that anyone believe amu pf this as a religious 
system but it is interesting to the student of the history of ideas. 
Especially since none of it is known generally today, despite being 
around for 2000 years.

Modern scholars tend to dismiss the CLEMENTINES but they dovetail 
with acknowledged facts in so many ways that I am persuaded there is 
some historic truth in them and that they contain elements of 
a "secret history" of Paul. It is always a guy's enemies who 
preserve the most juicy stuff for historians, and the Ebionites who 
wrote THE CLEMENTINES considered Paul "an apostate from the [Jewish] 
law." They would have been motivated to preserve legends members of 
the Pauline school might have wished to have go away. The original 
letters contained references to Paul's wife, but those references 
have been edited out of the versions that exist today. The story has 
Paul oerfirming some seemingly outrageous miracles, but on reflection 
all the story is saying is that he believed he could perform astral 
projection.

Anyway, in THE CLEMENTINES Dositheus and his wife symbolically 
represented Depth (Bythos) and Silence (Sige) which are supposed to 
have ppreceded everything else. Before there was the Word (Logos( 
there was Silence (Sige), etc. This got a little distorted by the 
heresiarchs. The inner circle consisted of thirty students, who 
represented the thirty AEons of the Valentinian system. That 
Dositheus really did have thirty disciple in his inner circle is 
confirmed by Origen and others. Another interesting point is that 
Dositheus was the star student and considered himself the heir 
apparent to John the Baptist, whose sect made its way to Basra in 
present day Iraq in response to Jewish persecution and is now called 
the Mandaeans. Blavatsky write about that, although not aways 
accurately. One of their texts is the CODEX BAZARAEUS, mentioned in 
ISIS, the complete text of which I have in my possession. There is 
another version, different from mine, on the Internet in the Gnostic 
Society Library under the name Ginza Rba if I am not mistaken. Mine 
is the same one referenced by Blavatsky.

Incidentally, THE CLEMENTINE RECOGNITIONS and all the rest of the 
ante-nicene literature and apostolic fathers are all on the Internet, 
from whence they can be downloaded free of charge. It was in THE 
CLEMENTINE REGONITIONS that I found the statement that people could 
harbor parasitis entities withut being visibly disturbed emotionally, 
a statement which lef me to the conclusion that Mary Magsalene, 
depite her seven "devils" may have been as apparently normal as 
anyone else. The belief in the existence of these entities and the 
relationship of this idea to the esoteric significance of the 
beatitutde about the "pure in heart" comes from Valentinus, who is 
quoted by Clement of Alexandria in his STROMATA. It takes a lot of 
jigsaw puzzle putting together to make sense of the whole thing, 
though.