Jules Doinel

Jules-Benoît Stanislas Doinel du Val-Michel (December 8, 1842—March 16 or 17, 1903), also simply Jules Doinel, 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. According to Gnostic Bishop Stephan A. Hoeller it is unclear whether Doinel was consecrated into a lineage of apostolic succession or whether he was "spiritually consecrated". [ [http://user.cyberlink.ch/~koenig/hoeller.htm Ecclesia Gnostica Position Paper Concerning the Thelemite or Crowleyan Gnostic Churches] by Stephan A. Hoeller (written in the early 1980s)]

For a time after 1895, he converted to Roman Catholicism and began a collaboration with Léo Taxil, an anti-Masonic writer who was subsequently exposed as a serial hoaxster. Doinel wrote a book entitled "Lucifer Unmasked" in 1895 in which he stated that Freemasons worshipped Lucifer.

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