The Cup and the Alphabet

A man named Secundus, born about the same time as Ptolemaeus, puts it this way: there is a right Tetrad and a left Tetrad — that is, light and darkness. And he says that the power that withdrew and fell into deficiency was not produced from the thirty Aeons, but from the fruits of the thirty. [a]

Another man, Epiphanes, a teacher among them, puts it this way: “The first beginning of all was beyond thought, beyond speech, and beyond naming.” He calls this Monotes, and he holds that alongside it there exists a power he names Henotes. This Henotes and this Monotes, without projecting anything out of themselves, sent out a beginning to preside over everything that can be thought — a beginning both unbegotten and invisible — and he calls it a Monad. “Alongside this power there exists a power of the same being, and this one I call the One. These four powers sent out the rest of the projections of the Aeons.”

But others name the first and originating Ogdoad by these names: first Proarche; then Anennoetus; third Arrhetus; and fourth Aoratus. And from the first, Proarche, there was projected, in the first and fifth place, Arche; and from Anennoetus, in the second and sixth place, Acataleptus; and from Arrhetus, in the third and seventh place, Anonomastus; and from Aoratus, Agennetus, which completes the first Ogdoad. They want these powers to exist before Bythus and Sige. About Bythus himself there are many different opinions. Some say he is unwedded, neither male nor female; others say that Sige, who is female, is with him, and that this is the first married pair.

But the followers of Ptolemaeus say that Bythus has two consorts, which they also call dispositions: Ennoia and Thelesis, thought and will. First the thought of projecting something was conceived; then, as they say, the will to do it followed. And so these two dispositions and powers, Ennoia and Thelesis, mingled as it were with each other, brought about the projection of Monogenes and Aletheia by a marriage. The result was that visible types and images of those two dispositions of the Father came out from the invisible Aeons: from Thelema, Nous; and from Ennoia, Aletheia. This is why the image of Thelema, which was generated later, is male, while the image of Ennoia, which is unbegotten, is female — since willing is, so to speak, a power belonging to thought. For thought was always cherishing the idea of a projection, and yet was not able by itself to project; it only cherished the idea. When the power of willing was there, then it projects the idea it had conceived.

Another teacher among them, Marcus, an expert in sorcery, deceived many people time after time, working partly by sleight of hand and partly by demons. He claimed that the mightiest power, from places invisible and unnameable, lived in him. Very often he would take the cup, as though he were giving thanks over it, and, drawing the words of invocation out longer than usual, he would make the mixture look purple, and sometimes red, so that the people he had fooled imagined that a certain Grace was coming down and giving the drink a power red as blood. For a while the cheat escaped detection by many; but now that he stands convicted of the imposture, he will be forced to give it up. [h]

What he did was this. He would slip into the mixture, in secret, a drug with the power to give it that color; then, uttering nonsense for a good while, he would wait for the drug to take up moisture, dissolve, blend into the drink, and give it its color. We have already described the drugs that produce this effect in the book on the magicians. Here we have taken the occasion to explain how these men make fools of many and ruin them utterly. And if they care to give closer attention to what we have set out, they will see Marcus’s fraud for what it is.

This same Marcus would pour the mixture into a smaller cup and hand it to a woman to give thanks over, while he stood by holding another cup, an empty one, larger than hers. After the woman he had fooled had said the words over it, he would take her cup, pour its contents into the larger one, and, pouring them back and forth from cup to cup, say an invocation like this: “Grant that the Grace who is beyond thought and beyond speech, who was there before the universe, may fill your inner man and make the knowledge of her abound in you, as she sows the seed of the mustard tree in good soil.” [m]

While he pronounced words of that kind, astonishing both the woman he had fooled and the bystanders, he was taken for a man working a miracle — for the larger cup was being filled from the smaller one until the contents ran over. We have explained this contrivance too in the fourth book, where we proved that a great many drugs, mixed with liquids in this way, have the property of making them swell, especially when they are dissolved in wine.

When one of these impostors secretly smears an empty cup beforehand with one of these drugs and shows it as though it held nothing, and then pours the contents of the other cup into it and back again, the drug — being of a windy kind — is dissolved by mixing with the liquid. The effect is that the mixture swells, and swells so far that what was poured in is set moving; that is what the drug does. And if you set the cup aside once it has been filled, before long the contents return to their natural size, since the drug’s power dies out the longer it stays in the moisture. That is why he was in the habit of handing the cup round quickly for the bystanders to drink; and they, horrified and eager at once, drank the mixture as though it were something divine and the work of God.

These tricks, and others like them, the impostor tried to perform, and that is how he was made much of by his dupes. Sometimes he was thought to be uttering predictions; and sometimes he tried to make other people prophesy, partly by demons at work in them and partly by his sleight of hand, as we said before. He hoodwinked crowds, and led many disciples of this kind into gross wickedness, by teaching them that they were, no doubt, prone to sin, but were out of reach of danger, since they belonged to the perfect power and shared in the potency that is beyond thought. [p]

And after the first baptism they promise these people another one, which they call Redemption. By this second baptism they wickedly undermine those who stay with them looking for redemption, as though people who had once been baptized could be forgiven all over again. It is by knavery of this sort that they seem to keep hold of their hearers. When they judge that a hearer has been tested and can keep secret what is committed to him, they admit him to this baptism. Even then they are not satisfied. They promise their followers something further, to fix their hopes and make sure they never leave. For after laying hands on the man who is receiving the redemption, they say something in a voice that cannot be made out; and they claim that they could not easily tell anyone what is said, unless he were highly tested, or unless he were at the hour of death, when the overseer comes and whispers it into the dying man’s ear.

The point of this knavish device is to keep Marcus’s disciples in constant attendance on the overseer, each of them eagerly panting to learn what it may be that is spoken at the last — since knowing it will move the learner up into the rank of those admitted to the higher mysteries. About these things I have kept silent, for fear that anyone should suppose I was running these people down. That does not come within the scope of the present work, except so far as it helps to prove the source from which they got their footing, and the occasion they took from it for putting forward the opinions they hold.

For the blessed elder Irenaeus took up the work of refutation in a freer spirit, and he explained these washings and redemptions, setting out their practices in rougher outline. Some of the Marcosians, on meeting with his book, deny that they received the secret word in that form — but they have learned that they should always deny. That is why we have taken more trouble to investigate accurately and to find out in detail what instructions they give in the case of the first bath, which they call by some such name, and in the case of the second, which they call Redemption. Not even this secret of theirs has escaped us. For these opinions, however, we are willing to pardon Valentinus and his school. [r]

But Marcus, copying his teacher, also makes up a vision for himself, imagining that this would make him great. For Valentinus likewise claims that he saw a newborn infant; and when he questioned the child and asked who it might be, the child answered that he himself was the Word — and then Valentinus added a sort of tragic legend, out of which he wants the heresy he attempted to be made. Marcus makes a similar attempt. He says the Tetrad came to him in the form of a woman, since the world could not have borne this Tetrad’s male form, and that she revealed who she was, and explained to him alone how the universe came to be, which she had never revealed to anyone, god or man. She put it this way: “When first the self-existent Father — the one beyond thought, who has no substance, who is neither male nor female — willed that his unspeakableness should be spoken and his invisibility take form, he opened his mouth and sent out a Word like himself. And this Word stood beside him and showed him who he was: that he himself had been made visible as the form of the Invisible One.”

And the pronouncing of the name went like this. He would utter the first word of the name itself, which was Arche, and this syllable had four letters. Then he added the second syllable, and this too had four letters. Next he uttered the third syllable, which had ten letters, and then the fourth, which had twelve. So the pronouncing of the whole name came to thirty letters and four syllables. Each of the elements had its own letters, its own form, and its own pronunciation, and figures and images of its own; and there was not one of them that sees the form of the whole of which it is itself an element. Of course none of them could know the pronunciation of the letter next to it — only the way it pronounces itself; and in pronouncing that, it supposed it was uttering the whole name. For each of these elements, being part of the whole name, names its own particular sound as if it were the whole. And it does not stop sounding until it arrived at the last letter of the last element and uttered it in a single articulation.

Then, he said, the restoration of the whole came about, when all of them came down into the one letter and sounded one and the same pronunciation; and he supposed that an image of that pronunciation exists when we all say the word Amen together. These sounds, he says, are the ones that gave form to the Aeon that has no substance and no birth; and those forms are what the Lord called angels — the forms that gaze on the Father’s face without ceasing.

The names of the elements, both the generic and the expressed, he called Aeons, and Words, and Roots, and Seeds, and Pleromas, and Fruits. Every one of these, he holds, and whatever belongs to each, is understood to be contained in the name Ecclesia. And the final letter of the last element sent out its own particular articulation. The sound of this letter came forth and produced, after the images of the elements, elements of its own; and out of these, he says, the things here below were furnished, and the things before them were produced. [w]

The letter itself — the one whose sound went along with the sound below — was, he says, taken up by its own syllable into the completion of the whole name; but the sound, cast outside as it were, stayed below. And the element from which the letter came down below, along with its own pronunciation, is, he says, made up of thirty letters, and each one of the thirty letters contains other letters inside it, the ones by which the name of that letter is spelled. And those other letters again are named by different letters, and the rest by still different ones, so that if you wrote out the letters one by one the number would run off into infinity.

Here is a way to understand more clearly what is being said. The element Delta, he says, has five letters in it: Delta, Epsilon, Lambda, Tau, and Alpha — and these very letters are written by means of other letters. If, then, the whole substance of Delta runs off into infinity, and different letters keep on producing different letters and following one after another, how much greater than that one element is the vast sea of the letters! And if a single letter is infinite in this way, look at the depth of letters in the whole name — the letters out of which the patient industry of Marcus, or rather, I should say, his useless labor, wants the Forefather of all things to be made up. That is why he holds that the Father, knowing that he himself cannot be contained, granted to the elements, which he also calls Aeons, that each one of them should cry out its own particular pronunciation, since no one of them could pronounce the whole.

And after explaining these things, Marcus said, the Tetrad spoke as follows: “Now I want to show you Truth herself as well. I have brought her down from the dwellings above, so that you may see her naked and come to know her beauty — and hear her speak, too, and marvel at her wisdom. Look, then, first at the head above: Alpha and Omega. The neck: Beta and Psi. The shoulders, together with the hands: Gamma and Chi. The breasts: Delta and Phi. The diaphragm: Epsilon and Upsilon. The belly: Zeta and Tau. The genitals: Eta and Sigma. The thighs: Theta and Rho. The knees: Iota and Pi. The calves: Kappa and Omicron. The ankles: Lambda and Xi. The feet: Mu and Nu.” [z]

That, according to Marcus, is what is in the body of Truth. This is the figure of the element; this is the character of the letter. And he calls this element Man, and says it is the source of every word and the originating principle of every sound, the putting into speech of everything that cannot be spoken, and the mouth of a silence that is kept silent. And this is her own body. But as for you — lift up the mind’s power to conceive, and hear from Truth’s own mouths about the Word, who is his own Begetter and the Forefather.

But after he had said these words, Marcus tells us, Truth gazed at him, opened her mouth, and spoke the discourse just mentioned. And the discourse became a name, and the name was the one we know and utter: Christ Jesus. As soon as she had named it she fell silent. Marcus was expecting her to say more; but the Tetrad came forward into the middle again and spoke as follows: “You thought the discourse you heard from the mouth of Truth was of no account. And yet this name, which you know and seem to have possessed for a long time, is not the name. You have only the sound of it; you do not know its power. For Jesus is a remarkable name, having six letters, called on by all who belong to the called. But the other name has many parts, and is among the Aeons of the Pleroma. It is of another form and a different type, and it is recognized by those beings who are born together with it, whose greatnesses are with it continually.” [ac]