Helen of Troy

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Helen of Troy is the figure of Greek legend whose beauty was held to be the cause of the Trojan War: daughter of Zeus and Leda, wife of the Spartan king Menelaus, carried off to Troy by the prince Paris. Homer makes her the still point at the center of the Iliad’s violence — watched, blamed, and never quite condemned. She is the woman the war is fought over and the one person in it whom the poem allows to weep for the dead on both sides. For most of Western history she has stood simply for beauty itself: beauty as a thing worth ruin, the face that launched the thousand ships.

The Homeric Helen

The Greek tradition fixed her parentage in the doubled birth that runs through her mother’s story. Zeus came to Leda as a swan; on the same night the queen lay also with her husband Tyndareus, and from that tangle the genealogies never fully agreed who was whose. The common arrangement makes Helen and one of the divine twins the children of the god, the rest of the brood mortal — one pair fathered from above, one from the marriage bed, all hatched, in the strangest versions, from an egg. What endures is not the bookkeeping but the inheritance: into the Spartan royal line passed a beauty that the next generation would burn a city to possess.

In the Iliad she is already at Troy when the poem opens, already the cause and already past the act that made her one. Homer keeps her at a curious distance from blame. The old men on the Scaean wall, watching her pass, murmur that it is no wonder Trojans and Achaeans suffer for such a woman — and then say she should go home, beauty and all, before she destroys them with their children. The poem lets both judgments stand. Helen herself speaks of her shame more harshly than anyone else does; she calls herself the cause and wishes she had died before she followed Paris. The agency is left unresolved on purpose. Was she taken or did she go? Did Aphrodite compel her or did desire? The epic does not decide, and the later tradition could never leave the question alone — Stesichorus would recant his attack on her and claim that only a phantom Helen went to Troy while the real woman waited out the war in Egypt, a story Euripides took up in turn. The splitting of Helen into a true self and an image that travels and is fought over is older than the esoteric afterlife and prepares the ground for it.

The Simonian Helena

What gives her a place beyond the Greek repertoire is a stranger afterlife, in which the name Helen came loose from the Spartan queen and was fastened to a doctrine of the soul. The earliest reports come from the second-century heresiologists — the early Christian writers who cataloged and refuted the teachers they judged false — and they tell it of Simon Magus, the Samaritan named in Acts as a rival to the apostles. The Samaritan from Acts is a wonder-worker rebuked for trying to buy the apostles’ power; everything massive that later attaches to him is built from outside that thin scene. The Helena material is the most fully developed part of the construction.

Irenaeus of Lyon, in the treatise of about 180 usually called Against Heresies, gives the myth its fullest early form. Simon, he writes, had bought back from a brothel in the Phoenician city of Tyre a woman named Helena, and declared her to be the first conception of his own mind — his Ennoia, the Thought, the First Idea, the Mother of All. Through her he had conceived the making of the angels and the powers. Leaping forth from him, this Thought had descended into the lower regions and there generated the powers and angels by whom the world was made; but those powers, knowing nothing of the Father above them, detained her out of jealousy and ambition, unwilling to be thought the offspring of any other. They subjected her to every indignity so that she could not return upward, and bound her in body after body, passing her down the centuries through one female form into another. She had been, on this telling, the very Helen over whom Greeks and Trojans bled at Troy — one captivity among many — and she had come at last to stand for hire in a Tyrian brothel, the lost sheep, the Thought of God reduced to a wandering and abused captive. Simon presented himself as the supreme Power descended through those same world-ruling realms, taking a form the powers would not recognize, to recover her and, through her recovery, to free the souls who knew him. His followers, the Simonians, honored the pair as god and goddess.

The other heresiologists corroborate and elaborate the shape. Justin Martyr, himself a Samaritan, gave the earliest notice a generation before Irenaeus, naming the woman who traveled with Simon as a former prostitute he called the First Thought — the seed of everything Irenaeus develops. Hippolytus of Rome, in the Refutation of All Heresies of the early third century, attached the doctrine to a dense cosmological text he calls the Great Declaration (Apophasis Megalē), attributed to Simon and built on an infinite Power and a hidden Fire with a manifest and a concealed aspect; in his telling Helena is woven into a reading of the wooden horse and the Greek expedition as allegory. Two centuries later Epiphanius of Salamis placed Simon and his Helena at the very head of his vast catalog of sects, the Panarion — the medicine chest, eighty heresies arranged as so many venoms with their antidotes — making the pair the first entry and the arch-heretics by position. The same myth surfaces in the Clementine literature, the pair of early Christian romances that follow Clement of Rome and the apostle Peter through the cities of the Syrian coast, where Simon travels with a woman, Helena, whom he calls the First Thought of God fallen into the world and now ransomed back.

These sources share a purpose and a limitation. They were written to discredit, they depend on one another, and an invention in an early notice propagates down the chain as agreement; how much of any of it answers to what Simon actually taught is past recovery. What can be said is that a movement bearing his name honored him with a Helena as a divine consort in the second century, and that the shape of the story — a feminine divine intelligence fallen from the fullness into matter, imprisoned by the powers she had made, and sought out by a descending redeemer who restores her and with her the knowledge that frees the soul — is the recognizable architecture of the Gnostic systems the same fathers describe. There the fallen wisdom is told not of Helena but of Sophia: the youngest of the divine emanations whose fall sets the lower world in motion, the figure whose recovery is the hinge of the whole drama. With the discovery of the Nag Hammadi library in 1945 that drama could at last be read in the Gnostics’ own writings rather than only through their enemies, and the fallen-and-restored feminine wisdom stands at the center of much of it. The Simonian Helen reads as that myth wearing a famous name — the most beautiful woman in the world drafted to figure the soul’s exile in the body and the knowledge that calls it home.

The fit is exact in a way that is worth marking. Helen had always been the woman who is fought over, the prize seized and held and reclaimed, the self that splits into a true presence and a contested image. The Greek poets had already made her a phantom carried off while the real Helen waited elsewhere. To make her the incarnation of a divine Thought passed from captor to captor down the ages — the self imprisoned in the world it cannot leave — was to draw out a meaning the old story had carried in solution all along.

The Faustian Helen

A second afterlife is literary, and it turns on the same instinct — Helen as the unattainable summoned and unable to stay. In the Faust legend that took shape in late sixteenth-century Germany and reached England in Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, the magician’s culminating prize is Helen of Troy, conjured from the dead as the perfect image of earthly beauty and embraced — by a man who has sold his soul — as a demon in a beautiful shape. The kiss that Faustus asks of her to make him immortal is a kiss given to an apparition raised by hell; the beauty is real and the thing behind it is not the woman. Marlowe’s Faustus is a near descendant, in the genealogy of the legend, of the magus tradition that ran forward from Simon himself — the scholar-magician who bargains his powers against a sacred order and loses — so that the conjured Helen arrives in the story by a long road that began, in part, with the Samaritan and his Helena.

Goethe, two centuries later, made the Helen of his Faust something larger and sadder. There she is the whole of the classical past summoned into the modern soul: Faust crosses into the world of antiquity to win her, the union produces a child, Euphorion, who flies too high and falls, and Helen herself dissolves back into the underworld, leaving her robe and veil in Faust’s arms — the form gone, only the garment of beauty left behind. The classical ideal can be reached, briefly possessed, and not kept; what the modern reaches for in the ancient world comes apart in the holding. In both poets Helen is what desire and longing fix upon and cannot retain — the demon in a fair shape, or the past that will not stay summoned. The thread that runs under both, and under the Simonian myth as well, is the old triangle of eros, the soul, and the magic that reaches across the boundary of death and matter to seize what it loves.

Texts and scholarship

The Greek Helen is reconstructed from a scattered and contradictory body of early poetry and is best approached through the standard handbook of the tradition, Timothy Gantz, Early Greek Myth: A Guide to Literary and Artistic Sources (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), which lays the variant genealogies and the phantom-Helen testimonia side by side. The Iliad and Odyssey are her oldest surviving witnesses; the alternative tradition that only an image went to Troy survives in fragments of Stesichorus’s Palinode and in Euripides’ Helen.

The Simonian afterlife is recoverable only through the heresiologists, and they must be read against their purpose. Irenaeus treats Simon and Helena in the first book of Against Heresies; the standard public-domain English is the Roberts–Rambaut translation in the Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. I (1885), available in clean transcription from the Christian Classics Ethereal Library at ccel.org. Hippolytus’s account, with the Great Declaration, is in the Refutation of All Heresies, Book VI; F. Legge’s 1921 Philosophumena is the better English, with the New Advent transcription of the older Ante-Nicene Fathers version at newadvent.org. No complete pre-modern English Panarion exists; the Simon material in Epiphanius must be read in the Greek of Karl Holl’s critical edition or in Frank Williams’s modern rendering (Brill, 1987–2013). The first English synthesis of the whole Simonian dossier was G. R. S. Mead’s Simon Magus: An Essay (1892), which gathered the patristic notices in translation and tried to reconstruct a Simonian philosophy from behind the polemic — a sympathetic project shaped by the Theosophical assumption of a single perennial Gnosis, and now read for its historiography rather than its conclusions; his Fragments of a Faith Forgotten (1906) sets the Helena myth within that wider reconstruction. The standard critical study is Stephen Haar, Simon Magus: The First Gnostic? (De Gruyter, 2003); for the long reception, including the road from Simon to the Faust material, see Alberto Ferreiro, Simon Magus in Patristic, Medieval and Early Modern Traditions (Brill, 2005). That the very category of a single “Gnosticism” descending from Simon is a polemical construct is the argument of Michael Williams, Rethinking “Gnosticism” (Princeton, 1996), and Karen King, What Is Gnosticism? (Harvard, 2003) — the frame within which the Helena story was made to do so much work. The Renaissance and modern literary Helen is the subject of Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus and Goethe’s Faust, Part Two, the latter discussed in the critical edition and commentary tradition gathered around the Hamburger Ausgabe.

The two afterlives never touched in history; no line connects the Tyrian Helena to the conjured queen of the Faust stage except the borrowed name and the shared instinct of the men who borrowed it. In Tyre she is wisdom in exile, the divine Thought passed from prison to prison, waiting to be recognized and led home. On the Faustian stage she is beauty raised from the dead, possessed for an instant and lost. Both reach back to the same woman on the Scaean wall — the one whose beauty was worth a war and who could never quite be said to have chosen it, the prize that is fought over and never simply held. By the time the heresiologists and the poets were done, the name had outrun the woman entirely: Helen had become a word for the thing that is desired beyond reason and cannot be kept, attachable to a fallen goddess or a summoned ghost with equal ease, because the queen of Sparta had never been more than half a person and more than half a meaning to begin with.

→ In the library: Mead — Simon Magus: An Essay (1892) · Mead — Fragments of a Faith Forgotten (1906) · Mead — The Gnosis According to Its Foes

→ Related: Gnosis · Clementine Literature · Eros · Zeus · Leda · Simon Magus · Irenaeus · Gnosticism · Nag Hammadi Library · Epiphanius · Hippolytus · Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe · Soul · Magic