DeConick A.D

237
SPIRITUAL AVATARS
powerful draw toward sin. If it was not well managed, they thought that
desire and lust could take over and draw them into adulterous relationships
and other sexual catastrophes. Added to this suspicion was the very
real possibility that the world would be ending any day. Such apocalyptic
fever played havoc with marriages, the abrupt end of which was certain.
With the advanced age of the world, procreation—and marriage along
with it—was deemed unnecessary by many Christians.
Valentinus did not buy into this Christian rhetoric; he was certain that
marriage is what grounds us and makes us whole. It is primordial and
eternal, because marriage is not just a human institution but a sacred
mystery, an existential relationship in which God exists along with us. The
Valentinian God is a syzygos (permanent couple), a husband and wife pair
of gods, a dyad that is a monad. They are yoked together in an erotic and
procreative relationship that is responsible for the creation and maintenance
of the transcendent and cosmic realms.
Their origin story starts with the Father, the Depth, who mates with the
Mother Silence. The consummation of their marriage results in the birth
of twin gods, the male Mind and the female Truth, another husband and
wife syzygos . The mating of the divine couples continues until there are
born thirty divinities or aeons in total. From the Valentinian perspective,
sacred marriage, with its erotic and procreative dimensions, is the source of
all existence on earth and in heaven. There is no greater mystery than this.
The fault line, however, is also sacred marriage. When sacred marriage
is breached, when Sophia is unable to maintain her own spousal relationship
because of her obsession with the Father, all hell breaks loose. God is
fractured by spousal separation and God’s severe emotional response is inscribed
in our hearts. The traumatized Sophia is cast out of paradise, and
her raw emotions—desire, anxiety, fear, ignorance, repentance—are separated
from the transcendent world. They become the stuff from which the
physical world, including the human psyche, is built.
Our spirits are born out of Sophia’s love for God, mismanaged as it is.
Also born from this love are a host of guardian angels, the twin counterparts
of our spirits. Because Sophia’s love is not conjugal, the human spirits
exist singly, separated from their avatars, isolated from their divine male
fiancés, the guardian angels. In this fractured condition, our spirits suffer
violence, plagued by demons who corrupt our souls and lull us to sleep.
The story of Adam and Eve says it all. We feel naked and afraid because
we have been separated from our angelic twins, our male counterparts.