Valentinians, a Gnostic sect, called after their leader Valentine, a native of Egypt of the 2nd century, regarded heathenism as preparatory to Christianity, and Christ as the full and final development in human form of a series of fifteen stages of emanation from the infinite divine to the finite divine in Him "the fulness of Him that filleth all in all," each stage in the process achieved by the union of a male element with a female, that is, a conceptive and a susceptive.