Oh, well, when I first came across the monastery, I didn't know how seriously people would take this whole monk thing. And I'd been reading a lot about Basilides, a gnostic heresiarch from Alexandria in the first century--Borges mentions him a little, as does Jung. Anyway, imagining that I ought to call myself something religious-sounding (how wrong that assumption turned out to be), but being personally a bit squeamish about giving myself an actual biblical name, I settled on Basilides.