Marcus and the Alphabet

This Marcus, then, claims that he alone is the womb and the vessel of the Sige of Colorbasus, since he himself is the Only Son; and so he has given birth, roughly in the way that follows, to what was entrusted to him out of the defective Enthymesis. [a]

He says that the Tetrad came down to him from the highest places, the invisible ones that cannot be described, in the form of a woman — because the world could not have borne it if it had come in its male form — and explained to him alone what it was in itself, and how everything began, which it had never before disclosed to anyone, god or man. It went like this. When the Father first willed it — the Father who has no origin, who cannot be conceived of, who has no substance and is neither male nor female — willed that what cannot be spoken in him should be spoken, and that what is invisible should be given form, he opened his mouth and sent out a Word like himself. The Word stood beside him and showed him what he himself was, since he had been made to appear in the form of the invisible. The pronouncing of his name went this way. He spoke the first part of it, which was the beginning, and that utterance was made of four letters. He added the second, and it too was four letters. Then he uttered the third, and this one took in ten letters. Last he pronounced the fourth, and it was made of twelve. So the whole name was spoken out: thirty letters, in four separate utterances.

Each of these elements has its own letters, its own character and pronunciation, its own shapes and images, and not one of them perceives the shape of the utterance it belongs to. None of them knows even itself, and none knows how its neighbor sounds; each imagines that by its own sound it is naming the whole. Every one of them is a part of the whole, and every one takes its own noise for the entire name, and does not stop sounding until, by its own utterance, it has reached the last letter of each of the elements. The restoration of all things, this teacher says, will come when all of them run together into one letter and give out one and the same sound. He supposes that the emblem of that sound is the Amen we say together. The different sounds, he adds, are what give form to the Aeon who has no substance and was never begotten; and these same sounds are the forms the Lord called angels, who look continually on the face of the Father.

The names of the elements that can be spoken and are in common use he calls Aeons, and words, and roots, and seeds, and fullnesses, and fruits. Each of them, he says, and everything belonging to each of them, is to be understood as held inside the name Ecclesia. Of these elements, the last letter of the last one gave out its voice, and that sound went forth and generated elements of its own, on the model of the other elements. By these, he claims, the things down here were arranged in the order they now hold, and the things that came before them were called into being. The letter itself — the one whose sound was followed by that sound below — was taken back up, he says, by the syllable it belonged to, so that the whole might be completed; but the sound stayed below, cast outside as it were. The element from which that letter came down to the world below, along with its own pronunciation, he says is made of thirty letters; and each one of those letters contains still other letters inside it, the ones by which the letter’s name is spelled out; and those again are named by other letters, and those by others, so that the crowd of letters swells out into infinity.

You will see my point more clearly from an example. The name Delta has five letters in it: D, E, L, T, A. Those letters are themselves written with other letters, and those with others again. If the whole spelling out of the single word Delta runs away into infinity, letters endlessly generating letters and following one after another, how much vaster than that one word is the whole ocean of letters! And if even one letter is infinite in this way, consider the immensity of the letters in the entire name — the name out of which the Sige of Marcus has taught us the Propator is put together. This, he says, is why the Father, knowing that his own nature cannot be grasped, gave the elements, which he also calls Aeons, the power of each uttering its own sound, since not one of them was able by itself to utter the whole.

Then the Tetrad explained all this to him more fully, and said: “I want to show you Aletheia herself. I have brought her down from the dwellings above so that you may see her with no veil on her and understand her beauty — so that you may hear her speak, too, and admire her wisdom. Look, then. Her head on high is Alpha and Omega; her neck, Beta and Psi; her shoulders with her hands, Gamma and Chi; her breast, Delta and Phi; her diaphragm, Epsilon and Upsilon; her back, Zeta and Tau; her belly, Eta and Sigma; her thighs, Theta and Rho; her knees, Iota and Pi; her legs, Kappa and Omicron; her ankles, Lambda and Xi; her feet, Mu and Nu.”

Such is the body of Truth, according to this magician; such the figure of the element, such the character of the letter. He calls this element Anthropos, and says it is the spring of all speech, the beginning of every sound, and the utterance of everything that cannot be spoken — the mouth of Sige, who says nothing. This, then, is the body of Truth. “But you — lift the thoughts of your mind on high, and listen from the mouth of Truth to the self-begotten Word, who is also the one who hands out the Father’s bounty.”

When the Tetrad had said this, Aletheia looked at him, opened her mouth, and spoke a word. The word was a name, and the name was the one we ourselves know and speak: Christ Jesus. Having said it, she fell back at once into silence. Marcus waited, expecting her to say something more; but the Tetrad came forward again and said: “You have treated as worthless the word you heard from the mouth of Aletheia. The name you know and think you possess is not an ancient name. You have the sound of it only; its power you do not know. Jesus is an episemon name, made of six letters, and it is known by everyone who belongs to the called. But the name that is among the Aeons of the Pleroma has many parts, and another form and shape, and it is known by those who are joined to him in kinship, whose greatnesses are always present with him.”

“Know, then, that the twenty-four letters you possess are symbolic outflowings of the three powers that contain the whole number of the elements above. Count it this way. The nine mute letters belong to Pater and Aletheia, because they have no voice — they are of a kind that cannot be uttered or pronounced. The semivowels stand for Logos and Zoe, because they are, as it were, halfway between the consonants and the vowels, sharing in the nature of both. The vowels stand for Anthropos and Ecclesia, since it was a voice going out from Anthropos that gave them all their being; for the sound of the voice is what gave them their form. “So Logos and Zoe have eight of these letters, Anthropos and Ecclesia seven, and Pater and Aletheia nine. But since the number allotted to each was unequal, the one who was in the Father came down, sent out on purpose by the one from whom he had been separated, to set right what had happened, so that the unity of the Fullnesses, now made equal, might bring out in them all the one power that flows from them all. And so the division that had only seven letters received the power of eight, and the three sets were made alike in number, all of them becoming Ogdoads; and the three, brought together, make twenty-four.”

The three elements too — which he says exist together with three powers, and so make up the six from which the twenty-four letters have flowed — are multiplied fourfold by the word of the unspeakable Tetrad, and so produce the same number as those powers do; and these elements, he holds, belong to the one who cannot be named. They in turn were given by the three powers a likeness to the one who is invisible. And he says that the letters we call double are images of the images of these elements; add them to the twenty-four, and by the force of the analogy they make up the number thirty.

The fruit of this arrangement and this analogy, he claims, has been shown in the likeness of an image: in the one who after six days went up the mountain with three others, and so became one of six. In that character he came down and was contained in the Hebdomad, since he was the marked Ogdoad and held in himself the whole number of the elements — which the descent of the dove made plain, the dove being Alpha and Omega, when he came to be baptized; for the number of the dove is 801. This, he says, is why Moses declared that man was formed on the sixth day; and again, by the same arrangement, it was on the sixth day, the Preparation, that the last man appeared, for the rebirth of the first. The beginning and the end of this arrangement were both made at that sixth hour, when he was nailed to the tree. For the perfect Nous, knowing that the number six had the power both to form and to form again, showed the children of light the rebirth that was worked out by the one who appeared as the Episemon in regard to that number. And this, he says, is why the double letters contain the episemon number; for this Episemon, joined to the twenty-four elements, completed the name of thirty letters.

He used as his instrument, so the Sige of Marcus declares, the power of seven letters, so that the fruit of Achamoth’s own free will might be revealed. “Consider this present Episemon,” she says — “the one formed after the first Episemon, as though he had been divided or cut into two parts and left standing outside. By his own power and wisdom, and through what had been produced by himself, he gave life to this world, which is made of seven powers, after the likeness of the power of the Hebdomad; and he so formed it that it is the soul of everything visible. He uses this work himself as if he had made it by his own free choice; but the rest of them, being images of what cannot be fully copied, serve the Enthymesis of the mother. And the first heaven sounds Alpha, the next Epsilon, the third Eta, the fourth — the one that is also in the middle of the seven — sounds Iota, the fifth Omicron, the sixth Upsilon, and the seventh, which is also the fourth counting from the middle, sounds the elegant Omega” — so the Sige of Marcus confidently asserts, talking a great deal of nonsense and uttering not one word of truth. “And these powers, all of them clasped at once in one another’s embrace, sound out the glory of the one who produced them, and the glory of that sound is carried upward to the Propator.” She asserts further that the sound of this praise, wafted down to the earth, has become the Fashioner and the Parent of the things that are on the earth.

As proof of this he brings up newborn infants: the cry they give as soon as they come out of the womb matches the sound of every one of these elements. Just as the seven powers glorify the Word, he says, so does the complaining soul of infants. This is why David said, “Out of the mouth of infants and nursing babies you have perfected praise,” and again, “The heavens declare the glory of God.” And this is why, when the soul is caught in hardship and distress, it cries out “Oh!” to relieve itself — in honor of that letter, Omega — so that the soul above that is akin to it may recognize its trouble and send down relief.

So it is that he has poured out his nonsense about the whole name, which is made of thirty letters; and about Bythus, who takes his increase from the letters of that name; and about the body of Aletheia, which is made of twelve members, each of them two letters; and about the voice she uttered without having spoken at all; and about the analysis of that name which cannot be put into words; and about the soul of the world and the soul of man, in so far as they have the arrangement that copies the things above. What is left is for me to tell you how the Tetrad showed him, out of the names, a power equal in number — so that nothing, my friend, of what I have received as coming from him may remain unknown to you, and the request you have so often put to me may at last be answered.