DeConick A.D

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SPIRITUAL AVATARS
But that is not all. The ritual intonation of the seven vowels was
thought to float up as praise to the transcendent world, honoring the
divinities Anthropos and Church, who were originally given form when
God uttered these vowels.
As discussed in chapter 6, these vowel vocalizations were not something
Marcus conjured up himself. Pronunciation of the vowels had been
used for centuries by Egyptian priests to ensure heaven’s harmony. The
practice was surprisingly common among the ancient people, revealed in
many magical spells from Egyptian and Greek sources as well as in the
liturgies of the Hermetics and other groups in antiquity that used vowel
chanting to maintain order in the universe, to heal their bodies, and to
compel powerful divinities to do their bidding (Frankfurter 1994; Dieleman
2005, 64–80). Marcus simply shifted the practice to accommodate
the transcendent world known to the Gnostics.
By imitating the sounds of creation, Marcus’s congregants were convinced
that they were tapping into the primal power of the divine world
and harnessing it to heal their world and themselves. In fact, Marcus
was known for his therapeutic ceremonies. He taught that the unison
pronunciation of the prayer “AMEN” has restorative properties because
it harnesses the mighty powers of the thirty separate divinities as if they
were one.
In order to relieve his congregants’ personal difficulties and stresses,
Marcus guided the members of his congregation in the ritual intonation
of the long vowel Ô . They believed that Ô is a universal letter of healing,
because babies cry out this vowel whenever they are suffering or in need.
According to Marcus, when the distressed soul calls out this vowel, the
soul’s avatar angel hears it and sends relief down from the transcendent
world (Irenaeus, Against the Heresies 1.14.7–8).
There Is Something in the Wine
Marcus came to be known by the Apostolic Catholics as “the Magician,”
not only because he led his congregation in the invocation of words of
power for healing but also because he created theatrical rituals for his
church. The standard Apostolic Catholic mass did not deliver the kind
of emotional enthusiasm that he wanted his congregation to experience.
He believed that the presence of God had to be experienced in his