Jules Doinel

Jules Doinel (1842-1903) was the founder of the modern 'Gnostic Church'. He proclaimed '1890' the beginning of a new gnostic era, and took for himself the name Valentin II, after Valentinius, the second century Christian gnostic thinker.

For a time after 1895, he converted to Roman Catholicism and began a collaboration with Léo Taxil, an anti-freemasonic writer who was subsequently exposed as a serial hoaxster.