Chapter 13: Marcos and the Hellenization of Jewish Hermeticism

Irenaeus vituperated the Hermeticist Marc (or Marcos) in his Refutation of So-Called Gnosis, [thereby] unveiling his sympathies for the contemporary movement of the New Prophecy, many faithful people of which perished in the pogroms of Lyon in 177. He made fun of the favors that the aristocracy lavished upon him [Marcos], “the dames of the robe bordered with purple” (a privilege of the senatorial classes) and their propensity to the pleasures of love. True or false, this anecdote — so often plagiarized by Inquisitorial reports — translated the reprobation of popular Christianity for the “sins of the flesh”:

One of our deacons from Asia, badly taken with him, welcomed him into his house. As his wife was nicely made, the charlatan seduced her body and soul, and she followed him for a long time. Finally, and not without difficulty, the brothers converted her. She did not cease being penitent and cried about the outrage that the charlatan caused her.[230]

Breaking with gematria — interpretation from the numbering of the Hebrew letters — Marcos belonged to the Jewish milieu of Palestine or the Diaspora. He frequented Alexandria, where he was subjected to the influence of Philo, Basilides, Carpocratus and Asia Minor, which was the birthplace of Elchasaitism and so-called “Montanism,” and Gaul, where Irenaeus combated it.

Marcos renewed the feminine nature of the Spirit (Achamoth or Sophia). This was the meaning of the [rite of] initiation that he practiced, although Irenaeus’ report does not exclude an erotic usage of prophetism, taken up by the faithful of Montan: “After having introduced the germ of Light into the woman that he initiated, he declared to her: See, grace has descended upon you. Open your mouth and prophetize! If she stammered that she didn’t know how to prophesize, he made invocations and repeated: Open your mouth, say anything, you will prophesize.”[231] It is pleasing to recall here the original identity of the pneuma and the sperma, and the orgiastic character of the vocal modulations ascribed to the prophetesses of the past.

According to the Elenchos, Marcos reproduced the miracles that the fairytales of Montanist propaganda diffused concerning the Jesus who passed from angelos-christos to the Zorro for the poor. Before the faithful, he transformed water into wine, poured it into a small goblet that he decanted into a large one miraculously filled to the brim. His prietesses then administered the beverage in the guise of communion.

When the Church of the Fourth Century raged against the New Prophecy and its puritanism (which was called “Encratism”), its polemic would calumniously maintain the confusion between Montanism, which accorded certain sacerdotal functions to devoted women, who were sanctified by their virginity, and the cult of Marcos, in which women incarnated the spirit that impregnated bodies with love, a practice that the Church only perceived in terms of “license,” “debauchery,” and “fornication.”

Due to a natural malediction, fanaticism never resists the temptation to expound — by saving it from annihilation — the doctrines that are the object of its execration. Irenaeus thus surrendered precise information about the teachings of Marcos, which were the meeting point between Pythagorean mysticism and Jewish Kabbalah.

The Sige of which Basilides spoke, the Silence of the Nothing-God, had (according to Marcos) deposited in himself, as in a matrix, the germ of the Tetrad or Quarternary. In Hebrew, tetrad or quarternary is kolorbas, which the heresiologues transformed into a certain Colorbase, a disciple of Marcos.

The tetrad, an emanation of the Ineffable God, descended from the invisible places in the form of a woman. She revealed to him her proper essence and the genesis of the All.[232]

In the beginning, when the Apator — unconceivable, without essence, neither male nor female — wanted to render his ungraspable nature graspable, and to render his invisible nature visible, he opened his mouth and emitted the Word (Logos), equal to himself. The Logos placed itself before him and showed him its essence, because it was the visible manifestation of the Invisible. The pronunciation of the name took place in the following manner: he said the first word of his name, this being

A P X H
1 2 3 4

It was composed of four letters. Then he pronounced the second word that was also formed from four letters. Then came the third, which contained ten letters. The following one contained twelve. The pronunciation of the whole name included thirty letters and four words. Each of these elements has its particular letters, its own particular character, its particular pronunciation, its particular aspect and none of them know the figure of the word of which it is only an element, not even the pronunciation of its neighbor; through its own sound, it imagines itself to pronounce the All. Because each of them takes the sound that is its own for the All, whereas it is only a part of the All, and it does not cease to resonate until, in its emission, it reaches the last letter of the last element. After it, the restoration of the All will take place when the All is a single letter and will be the single and self-same emission of the voice; following the Marcosians, the image of the pronunciation would be represented by the Amen that we say together. The sounds form the substanceless and unengendered Eon; they are the forms that the Lord calls angels and that uninterruptedly see the face of the Father. The common and expressible names of the letter-elements are Eons, Logoi, Roots, Sperma, Pleromes and Fruits. As far as their individual and particular names, they are — following Marcos — contained in the name of the Ekklesia. The last sign of the last letter of these elements makes its proper voice heard; the sound of this voice will go out and engender — in the image of the letters — its proper elements; it is from this that the things of our world have been made and that have engendered those that came before them. The letter itself, of which the sound follows the echo from below, was reprized on high by its proper syllable so as to complete the entire name; as far as the sound, it remained below, rejected from the beyond. The element itself, from which the sign is descended with its pronunciation, is composed of thirty letters and each of these thirty letters contains in itself other letters, thanks to which the name of this letter is determined; and these last letters, in their turn, are designated by other letters and so on, with the result that their multitude extends to infinity, because each one is spelled in its turn with letters. The following example will make what one means to say better understood: the letter Delta contains five letters. These letters in their turn are spelled by means of other letters and so forth. Thus if the structure of the Delta already decomposes into an infinity of parts, with each letter engendering others in their turn and relaying others, how much more vast would be the ocean of letters of this primordial Element. And if a unique letter is in fact infinite, you see the abyss full of letters of the entire name — following the Sige of Marcos — of the Propator. The Propator, aware of his incomprehensibility, gave to the elements that Marcos called Eons the faculty of making each one reecho its own pronunciation, a single one being incapable of expressing the All.

Then comes the evocation of the Naked Truth, in which each part of the body corresponds to letters, themselves adjoined to the twelve signs of the Zodaic, the twelve planets, the twelve hours, and the twelve masters (the Archons) of the entities or tutelary powers (daimon):

After having revealed this, the Tetraktys said to him: I want to show you Aletheia herself; because I have made her descend from the dwellings on high so that you can see her naked and so that you can remark her beauty, so that you can even hear her speak and so that you can admire her wisdom. Look on high:

her head A
her neck B Y
her shoulders and her hands T X
her bosom D Q
her diaphram E T
her belly Z T
her sex H E
her thighs O P
her knees I N
her legs K O
her ankles A E
her feet M N

The ancient tradition, probably issued from the Jewish milieu in Alexandria in the First Century, enlightened the remark reprized in the Apocalypse attributed to John: “I am the Alpha and the Omega, said the Lord God, He who is, He who was and He who will be, the All-Powerful.” (Dubourg has indicated the Hebraic origin of the formula “He who has been, is, will be” as follows: “The Hebrew verbs are not conjugated in the past, present or future (...) but to the accomplished or unaccomplished.”[233] For example, the accomplished form of the verb to say [MR] means: he says/has said/will say, completely, absolutely; the unaccomplished form [Y’MR] means it is/was/will be in the process of saying.)

The entirety of the correspondances between the letters and the Eons constitute the Plerome. By grasping an Eon in its globality, magic allows action upon the universe. (Manuscript 44 at Nag-Hammadi consequently contains an invocation of the vowels. The “symphonia” or song of the seven vowels, each of which each represents a planet, allows, through its combinations, the expression of the harmony of the celestial spheres and the action on the stars. [Charles] Fourier would expound a similar conception. The universe, conceived as language, loans its meaning to Kabbalistic and magical investigations.)

By annexing the Logos Jesus, the syncretism of Marcos defined itself as a Christianity and perhaps reveals why an agreement existed in Alexandria and Antioch, towards the end of the First Century or the beginning of the Second, between the schools of Satornil of Cerinthe, Peter, Jacob, Thomas and Saul concerning the secret name of the Messiah, the biblical Joshua erected as a symbol of revised Judaism.

Its Hellenized version probably refers to the same calculations that intrigued the esoteric circles to which Essenism gave the tone (cf. the horoscope of the Messiah, the interpretation of the letter Waw or Episemon, the sixth letter of the Hebrew alphabet):

When the Tetraktys said these words, Aletheia looked at him and opened her mouth to pronounce a word (Logos). This Word became a name and the name is that which we know and say: Christ Jesus. This name pronounced, she immediately returned to a profound silence. As Marcos expected her to say more, the Tetraktys advanced to speak again: Have you thus considered as so insignificant the Word that you have heard from the mouth of Aletheia? It is not a question here of the name that you know and believe that you have possessed for a long time. You have only known the sound; you are not aware of all its virtue. Because IHEOYE is an insignificant name to all; it is composed of six letters and it is invoked by all of the appeals.

The three primordial elements, which compose three pairs of powers (Pater and Aletheia, Logos and Zoe, Anthropos and Ekklesia) and that together yield the number 6, and from which proceed the twenty-four letters, if one multiplies them by four, that is to say, by the Logos of the Ineffable Tetrad, yields the same number as the letters — that is to say, twenty-four. These twenty-four elements belong to the Unnamable. They are carried by the six powers so as to produce the resemblance of the Invisible. The images of the images of these elements are the three doubled letters that count double, as six letters; so, by virtue of the analogy, one adds them to the twenty-four letters and one obtains the number 30. As the fruit of this calculation and this economy, there appears in the resemblance of an image he who, after six days, climbed the mountain as fourth and became sixth, who redescended and was retained in the Hebdomade, being himself the Ogdoade and possessing in him the complete number of the elements. This number was revealed by the descent of the dove when he came to be baptized. The dove is the omega = 800 and the alpha = 1, because its numeric value is 801.

It was for the same reason that Moses said that man was formed on the sixth day (the name IHEOYE is composed of six letters); this is also why the salutary economy of the Passion was accomplished on the sixth day; it was the preparation by which the last man appeared for the regeneration of the first. The beginning and the end of this economy of salvation was the sixth hour, the hour at which he was nailed to the wood. Because the Perfect Nous, knowing that the number 6 contains in itself the virtue of creation and regeneration, manifested to the sons of the light, by the episemon that appeared in him, the regeneration that is worked by him [...]

As far as Jesus, here is his ineffable origin: from the Tetrad, Mother of All, came the second Tetrad in the manner of a daughter; thus the Ogdoade was formed; from it came the Decade. This was the origin of the number 18. Thus the Decade, come to join with the Ogdoade and multiplying it by ten, would engender the number 80, and the number 80, multiplied again by 10, produces the number 800, with the result that the total of the letters, allying the Ogdoade with the Decade, is 8, 80, 800, which is Jesus, because the name Jesus has the numerical value of 888:

I H E O Y E
10 8 200 70 400 200 = 888[234]