rld
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 of
Zeus; and he left another in like manner of Helen in the guise of
Athena, and his dupes worship them.

4. And he enjoined mysteries of obscenity and--to set it forth more
seriously--of the sheddings of bodies, _emissionum virorom,
feminarum menstruorum_, and