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SPIRITUAL AVATARS
majority of the human population fell into three social categories, which
reflected their response to Jesus’ message. The Gnostic response made
them pneumatics. Apostolic Catholic conversion made them psychics.
Refusal to convert made them hylics. People who had “extreme” status,
either as a prophetic teacher like Jesus or as a rebellious traitor like Judas,
were exceptions to this rule. Their creation was extraordinary, either from
divine cloth or from demonic cloth, which made them substantially the
same as God or as the devil and his father.
The Sights and Sounds of Truth
Marcus the Valentinian is one of the most colorful characters among the
early Christians (Irenaeus, Against the Heresies 1.13–20; see Förster 1999).
He was active following Valentinus’s death, particularly in Asia Minor,
along the coast of modern-day Turkey. By 180 CE, Marcus had settled
near Bishop Irenaeus in the Rhône valley just north of Italy, likely because
Gaul was a flourishing new center for Christian conversion.
Marcus built his church on a psychological principle that contemporary
megachurch leaders have only lately rediscovered: when it comes to
church, forget the creeds. People want drama and emotion. They want
their brokenness to be acknowledged. They want to be healed. They want
to be swept up in the promise of something better. And Marcus gave it
all to them, and more.
Like Valentinus, Marcus’s mission started with his own vision, a mystical
moment when Silence, the primal Mother God, took form and descended
to Marcus (Irenaeus, Against the Heresies 1.13–20). Because her
male form was unbearable, Silence stood before Marcus as a beautiful
female angel. Her dual gender reflects the fact that Marcus perceives the
primal deity in terms of the unfolding of a series of divine hermaphrodites
who are gender shape-shifters.
Silence reveals to Marcus how she came into being when the primal
God first uttered thirty separate letters. These thirty separate letters become
the thirty divinities that the Valentinians believe populate the transcendent
realm of Wholeness, called in Greek the Pleroma. These divinities
know only the sound of their own letters and can utter only their
own sound. They are incapable of uttering the whole, which means that