Gnostic monasteries were described by Philo the Jew in 20 A.D.
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Simon Magus is a tremendous figure who appears even in modern theology; the famous Tubingen school suggests that he was no other than St. Paul.
That is doubtful, yet it is discussed as a real possibility.
He was a great opponent of St. Peter, and it is said that, in the contest between Simon Magus and St. Peter, the early differences between the infant church of St. Peter and the claims of St. Paul appear.
Of course later on the church did everything to wipe out all traces of that controversy.
According to legend Simon Magus was a great sorcerer, he was called the arch-heretic, and he was supposed to be the father of the Gnosis.
As a matter of fact he was not; he was apparently a contemporary of the Apostles, and the Gnosis existed before that time; Gnostic monasteries were described by Philo the Jew in 20 A.D.
We must also assume that the man who initiated Christ was John the Baptist, and he was surely pre-Christian.
Simon Magus was said to be a wise man and a wanderer, like Apollonius of Tyana, another great sorcerer, a man very similar to Simon Magus.
Now on one of his peregrinations Simon Magus went to Tyre in Phoenicia, and there in a brothel he found a girl in whom he recognized immediately the reincarnation of Helen of Troy.
She was quite a young girl, and he took her with him, and from that time on she always traveled with him.
So the wise man was with a woman of bad reputation, a prostitute. Helen of Troy, as you know, was a woman with a pretty bad reputation, but symbolically she is the second stage of the universal mother.
The third stage is Mary, the Mother of God. That is most shocking.
The church hated the idea and so it was repressed; it was naturally considered by the apologist literature of the church as a particular example of Gnostic offense.
Yet that story has been preserved in those old Gnostic fragments, and it can be interpreted as the true and unadultered development of the anima.
The first form of a man’s anima is his mother. Eve the mother of all human beings, and the series culminates in Sophia. It is a Western form of the Kundalini yoga. ~Carl Jung, The Visions Seminar, Page 478
Carl Jung Depth Psychology Blog