He took round with him a certain Helen, a hired prostitute from the
Phoenician city Tyre, after he had purchased her freedom, saying
that she was the first conception (or Thought) of his Mind, the
Mother of All, by whom in the beginning he conceived in his Mind
the making of the Angels and Archangels. That this Thought, leaping
forth from him, and knowing what was the will of her Father,
descended to the lower regions and generated the Angels and Powers,
by whom also he said this world was made. And after she had
generated them, she was detained by them through envy, for they did
not wish to be thought to be the progeny of any other. As for
himself, he was entirely unknown by them; and it was his Thought
that was made prisoner by the Powers and Angels that has been
emanated by her. And she suffered every kind of indignity at their
hands, to prevent her reäscending to her Father, even to being
imprisoned in the human body and transmigrating into other female
bodies, as from one vessel into another.[7] She also was in that
Helen, on whose account the Trojan War arose; wherefore also
Stesichorus[8] was deprived of his sight when he spake evil of her
in his poems; and that afterwards when he repented and wrote what
is called a recantation, in which he sang her praises, he recovered
his sight. So she, transmigrating from body to body, and thereby
also continually undergoing indignity, last of all even stood for
hire in a brothel; and she was the "lost sheep."

3. Wherefore also he himself had come, to take her away for the
first time, and free her from her bonds, and also to guarantee
salvation to men by his "knowledge." For as the Angels were
mismanaging the world, since each of them desired the sovereignty,
he had come to set matters right; and that he had descended,
transforming himself and being made like to the Powers and