DeConick A.D

248
SPIRITUAL AVATARS
they can never truly comprehend the primal God, who is the sound of
the whole.
Silence’s mission in her descent to Marcus was to reveal to Marcus the
truth about the transcendent God. The truth turns out to be Truth, a
second angel, also a beautiful female. Rather than representing a separate
part of the primal God, as the thirty divinities do, Truth embodies the
whole primal God in one human-shaped divinity called Anthropos (Man).
What utterance produced this awesome divinity, Man? According to
the angel Truth, the utterance was God’s name: I-Ê-S-O-U-S, or Jesus.
The angel Truth explains that the name Jesus is a stand-in for God’s secret
name, the twenty-four-letter Greek alphabet that actually structures
Man’s body.
With this vision, Marcus believed that the powerful secret sounds of
creation had been revealed to him. Long before the medieval Jewish kabbalists
taught that creation occurred when God pronounced his ineffable
name, YHWH, Marcus taught that creation occurred when the true
name, Jesus, was vocalized from the mouth of Silence, the primal God
Before All Gods.
The Intonation of God
Marcus went on to develop a complex system of mystical practices based
on the numerology of the divine thirty and the vocalization of the twentyfour
letters of the alphabet. These practices were meant to harness the
power of the thirty transcendent divinities.
For example, the intonation of the nine mute letters (P-K-T-B-G-D-
PH-CH-TH) was believed to harness the powers of the Father and Truth,
whereas the pronunciation of the eight semivowels (L-M-N-R-S-DZ-KS-
PS) were thought to channel the powers of Word and Life. The seven
vowels (A-E-Ê-I-O-U-Ô) were understood to draw out the powers of
Man and Church (Irenaeus, Against the Heresies 1.14.5).
When congregants intoned the seven vowels consecutively (AAA-
EEE-ÊÊÊ-III-OOO-UUU-ÔÔÔ), they believed that the chaotic seven
heavens, which YHWH and his militia ruled, were brought into harmony.
Because the original utterance of each vowel had generated the
seven heavens in primordial time, its ritual intonation now controlled the
spheres in the present.