The Tears of Achamoth

Look at what happens next. When the second group of four — Sermo (Word) and Vita (Life), Homo (Man) and Ecclesia (Church) — had borne fruit to the Father’s glory, they were seized with a strong desire of their own to present the Father with something of the same kind from themselves. So they bring more offspring into being — in couples, naturally, like the ones before — by the joining of the two natures. Sermo and Vita pour out ten Aeons at a birth; Homo and Ecclesia produce two beyond that, which evens them up with their parents, since those two together with the other ten come to just as many as the parents brought forth themselves. [a]

Here are the names of the ten I mentioned: Bythios (Deep) and Mixis (Mingling), Ageratos (Never-aging) and Henosis (Oneness), Autophyes (Self-grown) and Hedone (Pleasure), Acinetos (Unmoving) and Syncrasis (Blending), Monogenes (Only Son) and Macaria (Happiness). And here are the ones who make up the twelve I also mentioned: Paracletus (Advocate) and Pistis (Faith), Patricos (Fatherly) and Elpis (Hope), Metricos (Motherly) and Agape (Love), Ainos (Praise) and Synesis (Understanding), Ecclesiasticus (Church’s Son) and Macariotes (Blessedness), Theletus (Willed) and Sophia (Wisdom).

I cannot help quoting a similar case here, to show what these names amount to. There was once a Latin teacher of rhetoric in the schools of Carthage, an ice-cold performer, whose name was Phosphorus. He was declaiming in the character of a brave soldier, and he brought the speech to a close like this:

“I come to you, gentlemen of the city, from the battle, with victory for myself, with happiness for you, full of honor, covered in glory, fortune’s favorite, greatest of men, decked with triumph.”

And his students promptly start shouting for the school of Phosphorus: pheu! Have you been listening to Fortunata, and Hedone, and Acinetus, and Theletus? Then let out your pheu for the school of Ptolemy.

So this must be the great mystery of the Pleroma, the fullness of a divinity thirty times over. Let us see what special privileges belong to these numbers — four, and eight, and twelve. Meanwhile, at thirty, all fertility stops. The Aeons’ force and power and appetite for generating has been castrated. As if there were no rennet strong enough left to curdle any more numbers. As if no other names could be got out of the pages’ quarters. Why are there no batches of fifty and of a hundred begotten as well? And why are there no comrades and messmates named for them?

And then there is favoritism. Nus alone out of all of them has the knowledge of the immeasurable Father, and enjoys it, delighted and exultant, while the rest, naturally, pine away. To be fair to him, Nus did what he could: he wanted to pass on to the others everything he had learned about the Father’s greatness and unsearchableness, and he tried. But his mother Sige (Silence) stopped him — the same Silence who, you should know, keeps her own dear heretics quiet as well. Though they insist this is done by the Father’s will, since he wants them all to burn with longing for him. [j]

So, while they torment themselves with these inward desires, while they burn with a secret longing to know the Father, the crime is very nearly committed. Of the twelve Aeons that Homo and Ecclesia had produced, the last one born — excuse the grammar; Sophia (Wisdom) is her name — could not hold herself in. She breaks away from her husband Theletus and goes off alone in search of the Father. And she catches the same kind of sin that had already broken out among the others who kept company with Nus and had run on down to this Aeon, that is, to Sophia. It is what diseases do: they start in one part of the body and spread their infection to some other limb.

The truth is that under a pretense of love for the Father she was overcome by a desire to rival Nus, the one who alone enjoyed the knowledge of the Father. But when Sophia, straining after what could not be reached, was cheated of her hope, she is caught in difficulty and racked by her own feeling. She was all but swallowed up by the sweetness and the strain of the search, and dissolved into the substance that was left. There would have been no other end for her but destruction, if she had not had the luck to run into Horos (Limit).

He was a considerable power himself: the foundation of that great universe, and its guard from outside. They give him extra names too — Crux (Cross), Lytrotes (Ransomer), and Carpistes (Emancipator). Once Sophia had been pulled out of danger and talked round at last, she gave up looking for the Father, came to rest, and put off all that heat of hers — her Enthymesis (Intention) — along with the Passion that had come over her.

Some other dreamers tell the story of Sophia’s escapade and her recovery differently. After all that wasted effort and the collapse of her hope, she went — I suppose — pale and gaunt, and let her looks go, as a woman would who was grieving that the Father had been refused her, a hurt no lighter than losing him. Then in the middle of all this sorrow she conceived, entirely by herself, with no help from a husband, and bore a female child. Does that surprise you? Even a hen has the power to bring forth by her own energy. And they say that among vultures there are only females, which become mothers on their own. At any rate, here is one more female managing without a male. [p]

And now she began to be afraid that her own end was at hand. She had no idea what to do about her case, and worked hard at hiding it. Remedies were nowhere to be found. Where, after all, were the tragedies and comedies to borrow from — the plays that show you how to expose a child born without the decency of a marriage? While things are in this bad state she lifts her eyes and turns them to the Father. Having tried in vain, with her strength failing, she falls to praying. Her whole family joins in the petition for her, Nus above all. And why not? He was the cause of so great an evil.

But nothing that happened to Sophia happened for nothing. Every one of her griefs does work. All that struggle of hers goes toward the origin of Matter. Her ignorance, her fear, her distress turn into substances. At this the Father is at last moved, and to meet the case he produces in his own image the Horos I mentioned above — and he does it through Monogenes Nus, a male-female Aeon, since their accounts of the Father’s sex vary. They also tell us that Horos is called Metagogeus as well, that is, “one who leads about”, and Horothetes (Boundary-setter).

With his help, they declare, Sophia was checked in her wandering, purged of every evil, braced up afterward, and put back into her marriage. She herself, they add, stayed on the Pleroma’s roll; but her Enthymesis, with the Passion attached to it, was driven out by Horos, crucified, and thrown outside the Pleroma — “Evil, get out!” as they say. Even so, it was a spiritual substance, being an Aeon’s own natural impulse, though without form or shape, since it had grasped nothing; and so it was pronounced a weak fruit, and a female one.

So then, with the Enthymesis banished and her mother Sophia back with her husband, that famous Monogenes, the Nus — free now of all the Father’s care and worry — puts out one more pair, so that he could consolidate everything, brace the Pleroma and fix it at last, and keep any shock of the kind from happening again. I should think the coupling of two males a thoroughly shameful business; and if not that, then one of them has to be female, and so the male is disgraced by the female. A single divinity is assigned to the whole set, to fit the Aeons properly together. And out of this partnership in one job two schools actually arise, two teaching chairs, and, up to a point, the beginning of a split in the doctrine of Valentinus. [u]

It was Christ’s job to teach the Aeons about the nature of their pairings — you can see, of course, what the whole business came to — and how to form some guess at what is unborn, and to give them the power to generate the knowledge of the Father inside themselves. For it is impossible to catch the idea of him, or take him in, or in fact have any perception of him at all, by eye or by ear, except through Monogenes.

Well, I will even grant them what they claim about knowing the Father, provided they do not refuse the same to us. What I would rather point out is the perversity in the teaching: they were taught that what could not be grasped in the Father was the cause of their own perpetuity, while what could be grasped in him was the cause of their being generated and given form. By this arrangement, I take it, the idea is slipped in that it is better for God not to be grasped — on the very ground that the ungraspable part of his character is the cause of lasting forever, while the graspable part produces not perpetuity but its opposite, namely being born and being shaped. The Son, of course, they made capable of grasping the Father, and the newly produced Christ taught them fully how that is done. To the Holy Spirit belonged the special gifts, by which the Aeons — all now leveled to exactly the same eagerness to learn — could give their thanks and be brought into a true calm.

So they all stand on precisely the same footing in form and in knowledge, every one of them having become what each one separately is; nobody a different being, because they are all what the others are. They are all melted down into Nuses, into Homos, into Theletuses; and on the female side into Siges, Zoes, Ecclesias, Fortunatas — so that Ovid would have struck out his own Metamorphoses if he had known the bigger one we have nowadays. [x]

Straightaway they were reformed and firmly settled, and, brought to rest away from the truth, they sing the Father a chorus of praise out of sheer excess of joy. The Father spread himself in the general pleasure too — naturally, since his children and grandchildren sang so well. And why should he not spill over with delight? Was the Pleroma not out of danger? What ship’s captain fails to celebrate, and to celebrate indecently at that? We watch sailors boiling over with their kind of joy every day. So, just as sailors always make merry over the bill they split among them, these Aeons take the same sort of pleasure, being one now in form and — I might add — in feeling too.

With the agreement even of their new brothers and teachers, they throw into one common pot the best and most beautiful thing each of them is furnished with. Pointlessly, I should think. If they were all one because of that thorough leveling just described, there was no room for a shared reckoning at all, the pleasure of which lies mostly in variety. They all put in the one good thing, which is what all of them were. Presumably there was some accounting to be done in the manner, or in the form, of that very leveling.

And so, out of the whip-round they made to the honor and glory of the Father — a collection, as the saying goes — they jointly put together the Pleroma’s loveliest constellation and its perfect fruit, Jesus. They also give him the surnames Soter (Savior) and Christ, and Sermo (Word) after his forefathers, and finally Omnia (All Things), since he was assembled from a bouquet picked off everybody — like Aesop’s jay, Hesiod’s Pandora, Accius’ dish, Nestor’s honey-cake, Ptolemy’s medley. How much nearer the mark if these idle name-mongers had called him Pancarpos, “All-fruits”, after a certain Athenian custom. Then, to add some outward honor to this marvelous puppet of theirs, they produce a bodyguard of angels for him, of the same nature as himself. If that is simply their relation to each other, well and good; but if they are of one substance with Soter — and I have found how doubtfully the case is put — where is his eminence, ringed round with attendants who are his equals?

That series, then, contains the first issuing of Aeons, all born and married and producing offspring alike; Sophia’s extremely dangerous fortunes in her burning desire for the Father; Horos’ help, arriving just in time; the expiation of her Enthymesis and the Passion attached to it; the schooling given by Christ and the Holy Spirit; their guardian reform of the Aeons; Soter’s patchwork trimmings; the retinue of angels of the same substance as he is. [ad]

All that is left, you tell me, is the fall of the curtain and the clapping of hands. What is left, I say, is that you should listen and get some good from it. At any rate, all this is supposed to have been played out inside the company of the Pleroma, the first scene of the tragedy. The rest of the play is beyond the curtain — outside the Pleroma, I mean. And if things are like this inside the Father’s own bosom, inside the embrace of Horos the guard, what must they be like outside, out in the open, where God did not exist?

For Enthymesis — or rather Achamoth, since from here on she must be called by that untranslatable name and no other — was thrown out, along with the vicious Passion that never leaves her, into places without any of that light which is the Pleroma’s own substance; into the empty void of Epicurus, in fact. And so she becomes wretched from the place of her exile as well. She has neither form nor feature; she is an untimely, miscarried thing. While she is in this state, Christ comes down from the heights, conducted by Horos, to give the miscarriage some form out of his own powers — form of substance only, though, not of knowledge as well. Still, she is left with something of her own: the scent of immortality is restored to her, so that under its influence she might be overcome with longing for better things than her present condition. His merciful errand accomplished, and not without the help of the Holy Spirit, Christ goes back to the Pleroma. [af]

Where things are plentiful, names are usually plentiful too. Enthymesis came from an act; where Achamoth came from is still an open question; Sophia comes out from the Father, the Holy Spirit from an angel. She feels the loss of Christ the moment she discovers he has left her. So she hurried out herself in search of the light of one she never found at all, since he worked invisibly; for how else would she go hunting for his light, when the light was as unknown to her as he was? Try she did, though, and might even have found him, if that same Horos who met the mother so conveniently had not run into the daughter just as inconveniently, and shouted at her: Iao! — the way we hear the cry “Move along, citizens!” or else “By the faith of Caesar!” And that, so they will have it, is where the name Iao in the Scriptures comes from.

Blocked from going any further, unable to get over the Cross — meaning Horos — since she had never practiced the part of Laureolus in Catullus’ play, and handed over, as it were, to that passion of hers in a mesh of many tangled strands, she began to be afflicted by every impulse of it: by sorrow, because she had not brought off what she set out to do; by fear, that she might lose her life the way she had lost the light; then by shock, and then by ignorance. Not in her mother’s way, though — her mother was an Aeon. Hers was the worse suffering, given her condition, because still another wave of feeling swept over her: conversion toward the Christ who had brought her back to life and had steered her toward this very turning.

Well then: let the Pythagoreans learn, let the Stoics find out, let Plato himself discover, where Matter — which they insist is unborn — got its origin and its substance for this whole pile of a world. Not even the celebrated Mercurius Trismegistus, master as he was of all natural philosophy, ever thought it out. You have just heard of “conversion”, one element of that Passion we have mentioned so often. Out of it, they say, came the whole soul of this world, and the soul of the Demiurge himself, our God. And you have heard of “sorrow” and “fear”; from these everything else created took its beginning. [ak]

For from her tears flowed the entire mass of the waters. You can gauge from that what a disaster she had come through, so many were the kinds of tears she overflowed with. She had salt drops, and bitter, and sweet, and warm, and cold, and tarry, and iron-tasting, and sulfurous, and poisonous too — so that the spring at Nonacris seeped out of them, the water that killed Alexander; and the river of the Lyncestians came from the same source, the one that makes men drunk; and Salmacis came from it as well, which unmans a man. The rains of heaven Achamoth cheeped out like a bird, and here we are, carefully saving up somebody else’s sobs and tears in our cisterns. In the same way, bodily elements came from that “shock” and “alarm” we have also heard about.

And yet, in all that loneliness, in that vast prospect of destitution, she smiled now and then at the memory of the sight of Christ, and from that smile of joy light flashed out. What a kindness of Providence, to bring her to smile, and all so that we should not go on forever in the dark! And you need not be astonished that so splendid an element could beam upon the world out of her joy, when out of her sadness there flowed something as necessary to us as water. O illuminating smile! O irrigating tear! And the smile might have been some relief in the horror of her situation, at that: she could have shaken off all its darkness as often as she had a mind to smile, and would not have had to go begging to the ones who had walked out on her.