Tracy R Twyman posted an interesting article about Valentines Day (a holiday based on the pagan festival of Lupercalia), 50 Shades of Grey, sadomasochism and their natural links with Satanism, the Witches’ Sabbath and the Black Mass. She also posted something rather interesting that I haven’t really contemplated until very recently. She writes:
Wright traces the origin of the Witch’s Sabbath and Black Mass to the ancient rites of Priapus, the Greek fertility God honored by phallic idols and rites of debauchery, whose cult appears to have been spread all over Pre-Christian Europe. Wright believed that the Christian image of “Satan” was in fact largely based on images of Priapus, and demonstrated that the traditions of underground “Satanist” and “witchcraft” cults were actually sublimated forms of Priapism.
He shows that these traditions were passed on through heretical “Christian” groups like the Gnostic Ophites, the Cathars, and numerous others, all of which practiced obscene group sex rituals and all of which came to be suppressed by the Church. Gnostics and Cathars believed that they were “pure,” and that therefore these rites did not defile them. In fact, indulging in them in the sanctified form of a ritual turned into something sacred a sin that they viewed as an otherwise unavoidable fact of carnal existence. One Gnostic group is said to have used as a motto: “Nemo potest peccare ab umbilico et inferius” (“No one can not sin, from the navel and below.”) Or, as the New Wave band Depeche Mode expressed it in their Sado-Masochistic paean “Strangelove”: “I give in to sin, because you have to make this life livable.”
If the Gnostics were listening to Depeche Mode, they would most likely get behind “Personal Jesus” as their favorite song from them. Or maybe “Black Celebration”. In any case, the most likely thing you will ever hear about the Gnostics is all the bad boy behavior they perpetrated. The Gnostics were accused of a plethora of raunchy deeds and foul words. From the acts of Simony and encouraging divorce to flagellating themselves and working toward the destruction Jesus Christ’s one true church on earth. Tales are told of ex-Gnostic’s (the Church Fathers) blowing the whistle on these demon worshiping, zombie raising, blood drinking, brainwashing charlatan’s and Don Juan’s. They did it all. They were the Sultan’s of Tantra, the Johnny Depp’s of the holy altar, the Chris Angel’s of mock crucifixion’s, the William Blake’s of poetry and pun. Theirs was a world drowning in magic, immersed in myth and mystery. Like the cliché’ goes, “now you see it, now you don’t,” in the same time it takes to say it, they vanished from history. Or did they? 
Gnostics As Vampires or the Other.
“Say what??”, you might ask but it’s true. The Gnostics were known as the first Lestats, the Eric Northmans, or God-forbid, the first Twilight Edwards. I shutter the thought. There are reports from Irenaeus, Hippolytus, Celsus, Aquila, Nicetas, Origen, Justin, Tertullian, Jerome, Eusebius, Epiphanius, and Augustine–all of which have a very superstitious, paranoid view on these pesky, naughty Gnostics. In the Clementine Homilies II.7, Aquila and Nicetas claim that Simon said he would never die and in another place in the same writing, the Apostle Peter claims certain people desired to eat his flesh because Simon Magus said so! Pope Clement tells us:
“Simon was desirous of glory, and boasted above all the human race, that he wished himself to be believed to be an exalted power (Acts 8:9), which is above God the Creator, and to be thought to be the Christ, and to be called “The Standing One”. And he used this name as implying that he can never be dissolved, asserting that his flesh is so compacted by the power of his divinity, that it can endure to eternity. Hence, therefore, he is called “The Standing One”, as though he cannot fall by any corruption”.
And later, Peter claims that Simon encouraged the masses to eat his flesh and (presumably) like vampires, drink his blood:
Peter answered, “You yourself heard with your own ears how those who went before me came back from Antioch, and said that Simon had been there, and had strongly excited the multitudes against me by calling me a magician and a murderer, a deceiver and a juggler, to such an extent that all the people there were eager to taste my flesh.
This is much like the vampire known to the ancient eastern Europeans as Strigoi in Romania, or Vrykolakas of Greece which drank blood and were slain werewolves. This disease was caused by either a sacrilegious life, excommunication, eating sheep killed by a wolf, or burial in an unconsecrated ground. People with red hair and grey eyes were often thought to be vampires just as people with uni-brows were thought to be werewolves. There was a superstition about knocking much related to the Angel of Death of Exodus who kills all of the first-born of Egypt on the express command of Yahweh. It was said it was best to burn their corpses while they slept on Saturday or something to that effect. 
Simon himself was something of a self-styled expert on all things occult and magical. Many believe he is the black magician prototype in which the Medieval legend of Doctor Faustus is based after, and it stands with good reason.Clementine Homilies 2:26 tells us that Simon Magus produced a homunculus or an artificial human, out of air! This is likely Simon’s brazen contempt of the creator god from Genesis and his creating of Adam from the mere dust of the earth since Simon manifested a boy out of thin air. However, this claim is mixed with a horrid accusation that Simon Magus sacrificed a boy in a magical ritual, much like how the infamous Thelemite-Satanist Aleister Crowley would advocate in Magick in Theory and Practice:
[a] male child of perfect innocence and high intelligence is the most satisfactory and suitable victim.
It is often said that Crowley’s references to “child sacrifice” were ghastly euphemisms to masturbation in a magical ritual. In a footnote to this text, Crowley appears to confess to having murdered 2400 children: “FRATER PERDURABO…made this particular sacrifice on an average about 150 times every year between 1912 e.v. and 1928 e.v.” Now, I can see this as a reference to jerking off. However, we also find this same euphemism in the Book of the Law or Liber AL. Thelema is associated with child sacrifice in a fundamental way mainly because child sacrifice is commanded in the Thelemic holy book, Liber AL III, 12:
“Sacrifice cattle, little and big: after a child.”
As with many Liber AL verses, the language here is somewhat vague. It implies that before sacrificing cattle, both little and big (calves and full grown cows), a child should be sacrificed. Of course, in any occult literature, one could argue that none of the words should be read literally. Now Thelemites might argue that Crowley wasn’t really explicitly talking about killing children or using their blood with magick or something. Except of course, it actually does as Liber AL III, 24 tells us:
“The best blood is of the moon, monthly: then the fresh blood of a child, or dropping from the host of heaven: then of enemies; then of the priest or of the worshippers: last of some beast, no matter what.”
So the blood of children comes first and the blood of cattle should be sought only after the Thelemite magician has sought the blood of the innocent. Crowley really wasn’t all that different from a worshiper of Molech or even YHWH for that matter since they were all about burnt offerings of sacrificed animals and yes children. All of this seems to anticipate or corroborate with the ghastly Medieval legends of Satanism and the Black Mass, too. The Catholic Inquisition of witches and heretics could also be seen as a mass sacrifice for their god if you think about it. Let’s compare this to Simon’s alleged black magic and child sacrifice:
“For he even began to commit murder as himself disclosed to us, as a friend to friends, that, having separated the soul of a child from its own body by horrid incantations, as his assistant for the exhibition of anything that he pleased, and having drawn the likeness of the boy, he has it set up in the inner room where he sleeps, saying that he once formed the boy of air, by divine arts, and having painted his likeness, he gave him back again to the air.
“And he explains that he did the deed thus. He says that the first soul of man, being turned into the nature of heat, drew to itself, and sucked in the surrounding air, after the fashion of a gourd; and then that he changed it into water, when it was within the form of the spirit; and he said that he changed into the nature of blood the air that was in it, which could not be poured out on account of the consistency of the spirit, and that he made the blood solidified into flesh; then, the flesh being thus consolidated, that he exhibited a man not made from earth, but from air. “And thus, having persuaded himself that he was able to make a new sort of man, he said that he reversed the changes, and again restored him to the air. And when he told this to others, he was believed; but by us who were present at his ceremonies he was religiously disbelieved. Wherefore we denounced his impieties, and withdrew from him.”
Perhaps Simon drew a different conclusion from the saying, “Whosoever shall receive this child in my name receiveth me: and whosoever shall receive me receiveth him that sent me: for he that is least among you all, the same shall be great.” (Luke 9:48) So here, in the Homilies, Simon manifests a boy of air and claims that the boy had no immortal soul but that a demon pretends to be the soul. Irenaeus even complains that the Gnostics used exorcisms and incantations. Exorcisms were common among the Egyptians, Magi, Zoroastrians, and other shamanic groups in antiquity. Prayer itself is a form of incantation, so is the act of consecrating the Eucharist. The practice of pharmaceuticals was originally spells written on papyri and swallowed (or at least that is the story archaeologists have come up with). Really, they were likely nothing more than prescriptions followed with a dose of a drug which is why the paperwork still survives. 
“All Is Permitted”: The Gnostic Revolt.
The Apostle Paul once wrote in 1 Corinthians 6:12:
All things are lawful for me; but not all things are expedient. All things are lawful for me; but I will not be brought under the power of any.
If they weren’t murdering a baby and eating semen and menses they were talking smack about the Pope or some other Saint. Orgies and Symposiums were the norm. I guess Gnostic nuns were whores and Bishops fucked their way to the top right? Probably not. There is a tale of a miracle contest in the sky found in the Acts of Peter in which Simon Magus attempts to fly and falls from the air to his death much as in the Medieval Toledot Yeshu when Jesus and Judas Iscariot battle in the air. Jesus here, like Simon Magus, is a magician who can raise the dead and claims to be born of a virgin, but is a bastard son and a defiant student. The great late German-born Jewish Gnostic scholar, Hans Jonas placed libertinism at the center of the Gnostic revolution in religious thought. Libertinism was, as he wrote:
…the purest and most radical expression of the metaphysical revolt against the creator god and his schemes to arrest the absolute freedom of the spirit not only though the iron laws of nature but through the moral code as well.” (Gnostic Religion, 270).
Jonas points to Simon Magus, the Gnostic forefather of Faust, as the earliest source of the teaching that evil angels who created the world established “just actions” to lead humankind into servitude. According to the hostile account of Irenaeus, Simon charged his followers to ignore the moral laws of Moses and do freely what they liked. Anticipating Martin Luther, Simon claimed that men were saved by grace, not by righteous deeds. Simon were also accused of engaging in sexual licence, occult practices, and violating other biblical norms of piety. According to the Church Father Hippolytus (Ref. VI. XIV), Simon Magus and his followers were also very libertine in their ways:
But, again, those who become followers of this impostor—I mean Simon the sorcerer—indulge in similar practices, and irrationally allege the necessity of promiscuous intercourse. They express themselves in the manner following: “All earth is earth, and there is no difference where any one sows, provided he does sow.” But even they congratulate themselves on account of this indiscriminate intercourse, asserting that this is perfect love, and employing the expressions, “holy of holies,” and “sanctify one another.”
Marcion, though no advocate of libertinism, and was a strict ascetic, still reserved scathing contempt for the compulsory righteousness of those who are enslaved by the prohibitions and punishments of the law-giving god. According to the late, great scholar Adolf von Harnack, Marcion considered righteousness itself to be far worse than any sin because it makes people self-satisfied in their worldly constraint. They become too hardened to respond to the call of the alien God above the inferior judicial creator god of the Jews, who is love and nothing but love, and therefore the righteous are utterly beyond redemption. Like Simon in the Clementine literature, Marcion taught there were two gods as testified in his Antithesis. Marcion like Paul would probably condemn all of this behavior in 1 Corinthians 6:9-10, as he tells us about those Corinthian believers who exaggerate the freedom in Christ although this passage may have been added later by an Orthodox scribe:
Or do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived; neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor effeminate, nor homosexuals, nor thieves, nor the covetous, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor swindlers, will inherit the kingdom of God.
For the libertines, the defying of the creator god and asserting the freedom of the divine inner spark in the world extended to violating the moral norms as a way of exhausting nature’s power by satisfying the body’s sexual desires. Basically, a unsatisfied desire keeps the soul attached to the world by longing to fulfill that desire. For the Carpocratians, they maintained that souls continued to suffer reincarnation until they have engaged in every possible deed. Only then will the evil angels or the Archons who created the world release the soul from captivity (Irenaeus Against Heresies 1.25.4). This also happens to be the same logic that Shiva devotees, the Aghori’s follow in the Left-Hand Path of Hinduism.
Likewise, the worshipers of Cain, being the Cainites claimed that “They cannot be saved in any other way, except [if[ they pass through all things” (1.31.1). Irenaeus is pretty vague in his accusations, but Epiphanius is pretty explicit in his account. For example, he tells us that many Gnostic groups held a spermatic mass rituals where they consumed their sexual body fluids in sacred orgies (26.3.8-26.19.6). I discuss more about all this in depth here. The hostile, polemical tone of Epiphanius’s account leaves much doubt to its credibility though. Hans Jonas identifies the Gnostic libertine program of salvation through sin as a forerunner of medieval Satanism and Marque De Sade-like depravity associated with the European aristocracy that we see in movies like Salo: 120 Days of Sodom.
Another Gnostic heretic Cerinthus, according to the Church Historian, Eusebius, Church History, III, 28, claimed that after the resurrection, the kingdom of Christ will be set up on earth, and that the flesh dwelling in Jerusalem will again be subject to desires and pleasures. It would be something like was is depicted in the Garden of Earthly Delights by Hieronymus Bosch. He taught that there is to be a period of a thousand years a for marriage festivals, delights of the belly (food) and good old fornication with a better grace. Cerinthus was an heir to the teaching of Basilides or Saturninus, both of which were students of Simon Magus. He also taught the creation of the cosmos by angels. The God of the Jews was also an angel while the Mosaic law given by angels. However, Cerinthus actually kept the Mosaic law. He seems to be a fake-Jew opponent of Ignatius who is taking some ideas of Basilides and merging them with a Hellenic Judaism.
Like Simon, Marcus the Magician (or Valentinian), was said to be a regular ladies man and a Gnostic pimp daddy; a regular ecclesiastical James Bond if you will. Marcus was also the first person to practice an early version of the Catholic Eucharist with a female divinity at the center of it being Sophia, much like the Virgin Mary in Catholicism.
“Pretending to consecrate cups mixed with wine, and protracting to great length the word of invocation, he contrives to give them a purple and reddish color, so that Charis, who is one of those that are superior to all things, should be thought to drop her own blood into that cup through means of his invocation, and that thus those who are present should be led to rejoice to taste of that cup, in order that, by so doing, the Charis, who is set forth by this magician, may also flow into them. Again, handing mixed cups to the women, he bids them consecrate these in his presence.
When this has been done, he himself produces another cup of much larger size than that which the deluded woman has consecrated, and pouting from the smaller one consecrated by the woman into that which has been brought forward by himself, he at the same time pronounces these words: “May that Chaffs who is before all things, and who transcends all knowledge and speech, fill thine inner man, and multiply in thee her own knowledge, by sowing the grain of mustard seed in thee as in good soil.” Repeating certain other like words, and thus goading on the wretched woman [to madness], he then appears a worker of wonders when the large cup is seen to have been filled out of the small one, so as even to overflow by what has been obtained from it. By accomplishing several other similar things, he has completely deceived many, and drawn them away after him.” (Irenaeus, Against Heresies 1.13.2)
“It appears probable enough that this man possesses a demon as his familiar spirit, by means of whom he seems able to prophesy, and also enables as many as he counts worthy to be partakers of his Charis themselves to prophesy. He devotes himself especially to women, and those such as are well-bred, and elegantly attired, and of great wealth, whom he frequently seeks to draw after him, by addressing them in such seductive words as these: “I am eager to make thee a partaker of my Charis”. (Irenaeus, Against Heresies 1.13.3)
Marcus liked to share his Charisma with the ladies and get them drunk on pleasure and charm. He had a familiar spirit like Simon Magus. There is yet more dirt on Marcus:
“Marcus, thou former of idols, inspector of portents, Skilled in consulting the stars, and deep in the black arts of magic, Ever by tricks such as these confirming the doctrines of error, Furnishing signs unto those involved by thee in deception, Wonders of power that is utterly severed from God and apostate, Which Satan, thy true father, enables thee still to accomplish, By means of Azazel, that fallen and yet mighty angel,-Thus making thee the precursor of his own impious actions.” Irenaeus, AH 1.15.6
Irenaeus here makes a startling accusation by saying that Marcus invokes the power of the fallen angel Azazel in his charms and black magic, who is often associated with the “scapegoat” being a Jewish sin offering for Israel. The goat is also associated with the Goat of Mendes, Pan, and the Mercurial devilish idol supposedly worshiped by the Knights Templar, Baphomet. According to Islamic legend, Azazel was also associated with goat-like demons, jinn haunting the desert, the same type of desert the Israelites sent out a goat into the wilderness as sacrifice as seen in Leviticus. 
The Apostle Peter in the Clementine Homilies VIII. XIII, speaks about these fallen angels, in which Azazel belonged too, in which they all exchanged their divine fire for fleshy intercourse with women as seen in apocryphal and apocalyptic Enochian literature:
But when, having assumed these forms, they convicted as covetous those who stole them, and changed themselves into the nature of men, in order that, living holily, and showing the possibility of so living, they might subject the ungrateful to punishment, yet having become in all respects men, they also partook of human lust, and being brought under its subjection they fell into cohabitation with women; and being involved with them, and sunk in defilement and altogether emptied of their first power, were unable to turn back to the first purity of their proper nature, their members turned away from their fiery substance: for the fire itself, being extinguished by the weight of lust, and changed into flesh, they trode the impious path downward.
Dionysian Love-Feasts.
I wrote in my essay Eros, Orpheus and On the Origin of the World about how the Gnostics supposedly engaged in excess, libertine behavior:
Orthodox opponents of Simon Magus, alleged that he and his Simonian followers practiced magic and free love, a coupling of vices which would recur in attacks against similar groups such as the Valentinians, the Carpocratians, the Barbelo-Gnostics, the Borborites, the Phibionites, the Manichaeans, etc. The Bacchic cults were also accused of engaging in their orgiastic love feasts as sensual and sexual exuberance saturated the cult of Dionysus.
The god of hard-ons, Priapus was said to be the progeny of Dionysus and Aphrodite and had extremely large genitals. He was a god associated with the promotion of agriculture, fertility and all animals associated with agricultural life. There are many statues and illustrations depicting this god with a huge boner as well. Sometimes Priapus was conflated with Dionysus as well. And so many heretics were associated with Dionysian rapture and excess, which provided sacred transports to the ecstatic divine. In Medieval witch cults, Priapus was also associated with the goat demon Baphomet who is said to give female participants in sex orgies, great delight. Dionysus was also known as a bull-horned god, much like Baphomet. 
Tracy R. Twyman writes about the connection of Priapus and the Goat God of the Witches:
Despite the pain and humiliation, the witches loved being raped by the Goat God, and he always left them wanting more.
To quote form Wright again: Some of the witches examined spoke of the delight with which they attended the Sabbath. Jeanne Dibasson, a woman twenty-nine years old, said that the Sabbath was the true Paradise, where there was far more pleasure than can be expressed; that those who went there found the time so short by reason of the pleasure and enjoyment, that they never left it without marvelous regret, so that they looked forward with infinite impatience to the next meeting.
Clement of Alexandria, who, in his Stromateis 4.25.162.3 quoted some lines from Euripides’ Bacchae, putting them into Christ’s mouth (Euripides’ text in bold):
The Saviour Himself, then, plainly initiates us into the mysteries, according to the words of the tragedy: Seeing those who see, he also gives the orgies (ὄργια) And if you ask, These orgies (ὄργια), what is their nature? You will hear again: It is forbidden to mortals uninitiated in the Bacchic rites (ἀβακχεύτοισιν) to know.
In Neoplatonism, the Bacchic frenzy was a state of perfection of the human soul. A particularly good example of this can be seen in a passage from Julian the Apostate’s oration to the cynic Herakleios:
However let Dionysus himself decide about these things, though I do indeed implore him to inspire my mind and yours with his own sacred frenzy (ἐκβακχεῦσαι) for the true knowledge of the gods, so that we may not by remaining too long uninspired (ἀβάκχευ- τοι) by him have to suffer the fate of Pentheus … For he in whom the abundance of life has not been perfected by the essential nature of Dionysus … he I say who has not been perfected by means of the Bacchic and divine frenzy (βακχείας) for the god, runs the risk that his life may … come to naught. (Orations 7.222a–b).
In the Gospel of John, Chapter 2, the Marriage at Cana episode features lots of Dionysian symbolism where Jesus changes water to wine like a true Bacchic alchemist. The episode also features strong Hieros Gamos symbolism as well. The Jesus in Luke, also express similar sentiments.
And Jesus said to them, “The sons of this age marry and are given in marriage; but those who are accounted worthy to attain to that age and to the resurrection from the dead neither marry nor are given in marriage, for they cannot die anymore, because they are equal to angels and are sons of God, being sons of the resurrection.” Luke 20: 34-35.
Luke is speaking on two levels instead of just on a carnal level. Jesus in Luke is saying once you become “one” in the Kingdom you will not marry because you are already one in the “bridal chamber”. There is no need for marriage in the spiritual kingdom because the pnuematic element is married to all things God just as the knower and the known become indistinguishable, the two become one in the New Aeon. Many mistakenly often read the verse in the sense that if ones marries in this life or attain the carnal marriage, one will not become “one” in the Kingdom. Teachers like Marcion and Valentinus were distinguishing between two worlds or two Aeons. Thus, one is invisible and one visible, a cosmos and a Pleroma. It is they, the Gnostics who read the passage and the vast majority of scripture as spiritual allegory. A prominent Latin lawyer from Carthage, Tertullian in Chapter 29 of Against Marcion claimed that Marcionites forbade marriage in a carnal and physical way because of this final clause in Luke. Then he proclaims that is the work of the Anti-Christ.
…the state of matrimony does not require the hook and scythe of sanctity, as if it were evil; but as being ripe for its discharge, and in readiness for that sanctity which will in the long run bring it a plenteous crop by its reaping. For this leads me to remark of Marcion’s god, that in reproaching marriage as an evil and unchaste thing, he is really prejudicing the cause of that very sanctity which he seems to serve. For he destroys the material on which it subsists; if there is to be no marriage, there is no sanctity.
Despite all the rumors the Church Fathers were spreading, most early Christians and Gnostic (Sethian) groups actually rejected the idea of a carnal marriage and sexual intercourse, since they attributed the implantation of sexual desire to the chief ruler Yaldaboath in the Apocryphon of John.
“Now up to the present day, sexual intercourse continued due to the chief archon. And he planted sexual desire in her who belongs to Adam. And he produced through intercourse the copies of the bodies, and he inspired them with his counterfeit spirit.”
The sexual urge as such was something evil as being a sensual lust, but procreation was accounted far worse since by means of it the reassembly of the light particles was retarded. The condition of death was equated with procreation. Like I mentioned earlier, many Gnostic groups believed in metempsychosis, the Platonic form of reincarnation in which they sought to escape from and into the immortal realm. The Christians who followed Valentinus however viewed the carnal marriage for the sake of procreation as exalted and a sacred duty. One website remarks about the Valentinian view on sexuality:
On the basis of this metaphysical view, Valentinus and his followers valued both sex and marriage, at least for the pneumatics. A preserved fragment from the school of Valentinus gives the following interpretation of Jesus’ statement in the Gospel of John that the Christian’s life is in the world but is not from it (John. 17:116): “Whosoever is in the world and has not loved a woman so as to become one with her, is not out of the Truth, and will attain the Truth; but he who is from the world and unites with a woman, will not attain the Truth, because he made sex out of concupiscence alone.”
The Valentinians permitted intercourse only between men and women who were able to experience it as a mystery and a sacrament, namely, those who were pneumatics. They forbade it between those whom they called psychics (Jews and Catholics) or hylics (materialists), because these two lower classes knew nothing but libido. As the only early Christian on record who spoke lovingly about sexual intercourse and womanhood, Valentinus must have been a great lover.
The disregard for sexual impulse and libido while in support for celibacy and asceticism can be seen in the Untitled Mandaean Tractate we have a polemic against the “Pharisees”:
It is impossible to serve two masters, for the defilement of the Law is manifest, whilst purity pertains to the Light. The Law indeed commands one to take a spouse, to take a spouse, to take a wife, to increase and multiply like the waves of the sea. But passion, which is agreeable to souls, binds here below the souls of those who are begotten…For them it is impossible to pass by the Archon of Darkness until they have paid back the last farthing. The river of Jordan, this, to him, is the strength of the body—that is, the essence of pleasures; and the water of Jordan is the desire for carnal co-habitation.
This train of thought also appears even in Clement of Alexandria’s Stromata (Book 3), where he quotes Plato:
Again in the Phaedo he writes disparagingly of birth: “The secret teaching on this matter is that human beings are in a kind of prison.” And again, “Those who have a reputation for holy living that sets them apart from others are the people who are set free and liberated from these areas on earth as from a prison, and reach the pure home above.”
What does any of this have to do with Valentines you might ask? Well, all you have to do is look at the arch-heretic’s name of Valentinus and the connection there should be obvious. Valentinus’ Gospel of Truth tells us in strong romantic terms:
For this reason, God came and destroyed the division and he brought the hot Pleroma of love, so that the cold may not return, but the unity of the Perfect Thought prevail.
According to Irenaeus, the Gnostics supposedly concocted love-potions and forged charms. Love potions are also known today as Aphrodisiacs, named after Aphrodite the Greek goddess of love making. These practices were seen as survivals of Paganism. Yet, many of these practices were done by Jesus in the New Testament as well as the Jews themselves! Dionysiac terms already appear in the Greek poet, Nonnus of Panopolis’ (4th century possibly) description of the First Passover in the Paraphrase of the Gospel of St. John, which portray Judaic orgies:
Next he was near the God-built temple, and he marched through the temple precincts of Jerusalem, evoeing still more the Pasch. And the Bacchic feast solemnized the rattling secret rites of the lamb-eating priests. Many turned their faithless madness over to the tempests and had faith in the name of Christ. […] When the carousing Hours, mothers of piety, brought the revel of the holy feast.
Sex, love, orgies, ascetcism, ecstatic divine knowledge, yes, the Gnostics had it all.
